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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25944727">The Truth Lying Behind the Devil's Paintbrush</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven'>MistyBeethoven</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>"Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You with a Story or a Picture" [65]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Devil's Advocate (1997)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abusive Parents, Altar Sex, Angel Sex, Angels, Attraction, Autumn, BBW, Bad Parents, Bondage, Character of Faith, Christian Character, Christianity, Christmas, Church Sex, Churches &amp; Cathedrals, Counseling, Crisis of Faith, Cunnilingus, Dancing, Dark, Dark Fantasy, Dark Love Story, Deal with a Devil, Devils, Doubt, Dream Sex, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Engagement, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Florida, Flowers, Forbidden Love, Forgiveness, Free Will, Frottage, Gaslighting, God - Freeform, God's Love, Grief/Mourning, Halloween, Having Faith, Healing Sex, Horror, Insecurity, Law firms, Lawyers, Loneliness, Loss, Loss of Virginity, Love, Love Stories, Marriage, Masks, Metallica References, Mind Games, New York, New York City, Nuns, Older Man/Younger Woman, Oral Sex, Overweight, Pregnancy, Protection, Question of sanity, Rape, Religion, Religion Kink, Religious Conflict, Religious Content, Religious Discussion, Religious Guilt, Religious Imagery &amp; Symbolism, Rimming, Rings, Self-Doubt, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Sexual Coercion, Statue Sex, Statues, Temptation, The Poppy Family, Theology, Unofficial Sequel, Virginity, Weight Issues, but hopeful, graves, leaves</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:48:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>55,414</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25944727</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>At the firm of Milton, Chadwick and Waters, the clients are not the only ones with secrets, for the lawyers and the head of the firm itself, especially, each hold terrifying truths behind their smiles.</p><p>Being a young nun in New York City, I am blissfully unaware of this, struggling with my doubts and loneliness, until I see Kevin Lomax mourning at the grave of his recently deceased wife Mary Ann and am soon instructed by the Reverend Mother to help guide the young lawyer through his grief. Tempted by the handsome Lomax, I gradually learn that there is more to his request to be counseled than his spiritual needs and that both he and his enigmatic boss John Milton have much more sinister plans for me...</p><p>WARNING: ANOTHER POSSIBLE DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT ENTRY</p><p>*Added song lyrics for Chapter 10</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>John Milton (The Devil's Advocate) &amp; Kevin Lomax, John Milton (The Devil's Advocate) &amp; Me, Kevin Lomax (The Devil's Advocate)/Me, Kevin Lomax/Mary Ann Lomax, Mary Ann Lomax &amp; Christabella Andreoli</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>"Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You with a Story or a Picture" [65]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589944</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>30</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Request to Make a Believer Out of Him</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Kevin Lomax, step into my office it is now your turn.</p><p>I was saving you for Halloween and then I thought, no, Keanu's birthday. Then your story had the nerve to become a multi chapter deal! That meant it wasn't a one day affair so I might as well post it now and get you underway.</p><p>Right now I have 40 short stories 9 novelettes, 7 novellas and 1 play completed in this series. 6 stories still ongoing and yet to be decided what category they fit. That makes this the 7th. Good number 7...And today is Sunday, a good day (although ao3 might list it as the next day). All good times to start a story of God, the devil, lawyers, nuns, temptation, souls, rape and love.</p><p>So let's begin the story, shall we?</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>I meet with Kevin Lomax in his office at Milton, Chadwick and Waters only to be unnerved by the man's beauty and an unexpected appearance by his boss, John Milton.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>All around my house, during my childhood, grew a weed called the Devil's Paintbrush.</p><p>It was bright red in shade with touches of orange and yellow that complimented each other to make a flower to catch your eye amidst the green of the grass of the plain white daisies. I can remember my mother explaining the name to my sister and I once, although where we had been, at the time, has slipped silently away from my memory, alongside what we had been doing. It was the heart of her words that remained and I supposed they were all that were needed to leave a lasting impression on my young and impressionable mind.</p><p>"It's called a Devil's Paintbrush because it has all the colors Satan uses when he paints his Hell: the color red and all the similar shades in between."</p><p>From her words, she did not act like it was only a plant. Mother had treated the weed like it was the actual paintbrush the Devil used whenever he colored his realm of fire and flames, sin and cruelty; the place where God in His indiscernible reasoning allowed his enemy to live.</p><p>As well as all the places the one of evil had scratched his traces on the world.</p><p>There were many Devil's Paintbrushes around my house but I never collected them when I made my childish bouquets of dandelions and daisies, bluebells and pansies.</p><p>No.</p><p>I left the Devil's Paintbrush alone.</p><p>I wasn't supposed to like them.</p><p>Because of the name.</p><p>But I liked them anyway.</p><p>And hated myself a little bit for it.</p><p>* * *</p><p>"You're Sister Erin," Kevin Lomax greeted in his southern accent as he stood up from behind his desk in his luxurious, art adorned office at Milton, Chadwick and Waters. He was walking away from that same desk and coming towards me in his snakeskin boots and obviously expensive suit, one tailored to fit his lean, strong body, and I had never felt more fat and unattractive in my life as when I stood in the room surrounded by various objects of beauty. The books were leather bound and trimmed in gold, the paintings stroked with the skill bestowed upon true artists and the sculptures molded by those blessed with knowing hands. The center of the room, though, its main attraction which drew my eyes, seemed the dweller of it, himself. Thinking to myself how beautiful he was, and praising God for having shown His talent in every inch of the lawyer's face, I refrained from asking Him why he had made me so horribly plain in return.</p><p><em>"You are not supposed to want to be attractive anymore,"</em> my inner voice chided, sounding very much like the Reverend Mother at the abbey.<em> "Attractive implies the desire to attract a boyfriend, lover or husband and that is in your past Erin Kelly Smyth. God is your future; you must keep your focus on Him and nothing else."</em></p><p>It was true. I had started on my path to devoting myself to God, taking my temporary vows and renouncing all romantic and physical relationships. Seeing Kevin Lomax had confused me, however, just as it had on the day we had first met in the cemetary only two weeks before. In fact, if I had known that Lomax was the same man I had seen paying respects to his dead wife, I was not sure I would have accepted the mission the abbess had offered to me: to help spiritually guide a prominent lawyer through his grief over having recently lost his wife months before.</p><p>"And you are Kevin Lomax," I stated as he finally reached me. I prayed that he would not see written in my eyes my sudden trepidation over being there. I did not want to hurt his feelings but I was still nervous and regretful over having foolishly taken on the role to be his counselor during his mourning. "Forgive me, I didn't know you were the one I was coming to see."</p><p>The man extended his hand and as I took it in my own, he eyed me with doubt tinged with slight disappointment. "Come now," he stated. "You're telling me you haven't looked at the papers recently? I haven't stopped being in them since I requested to be taken off of the Gettys molestation case back in Florida. My winning streak is unprecedented."</p><p>I smiled, thinking to myself, that Kevin Lomax was not short on vanity. It was a little off putting until the lawyer's face suddenly lost its arrogance and became genuinely lost and sorrowful.</p><p>The same qualities which had attracted me in the cemetary that one bright autumn day.</p><p>"Or the more recent tragedy with my dear late wife."</p><p>You cannot fake the pain visible in the depth of a human's eyes. A blink, a half closed lid, yes, these can be offered to give the guise of a pain not truly suffered. But when you look at the pupil at the heart of a person's iris and in that darkness you see not only your own reflection but an agony kept hidden and caged, like a beast deemed too ugly dangerous to be seen at a zoo, you know that the suffering is real and threatening to destroy its host.</p><p>I quickly took his hand again and held it gently in both of mine while he was jarred from his grief, looking down suddenly at my hands tenderly cradling his own. "I don't look too often at the newspapers," I confessed. "Mostly it's just the entertainment section or the comics that get ink on my fingers. It upsets the Reverend Mother horribly. She has scolded me often because I find the other sections too distressing and she keeps reminding me that it is my vocation now to deal with human frailties. There is God's grace to help make it surrmountable, she has repeatedly promised me."</p><p>Kevin raised his odd gaze from off our hands to meet my eyes and I could not tell, at the start, what he had thought about my confession until he smiled brightly and stated. "In my profession, I'm afraid, I deal with human frailties alone. And the only grace is when a Judge says overruled in our favor or the jury gives a verdict where my client is allowed to leave the courtroom a free man and pay his exorbitant bill."</p><p>I laughed but instantly chastised myself incase his words were too irreverent. I often found myself doing that, unsure of how tolerant God's sense of humor was. Seeing my self reproach, Kevin studied me closely in my incomplete habit which indicated my youthful status as a nun and saw my own vulnerabilities.</p><p>"How old are you again, Sister Erin?" he asked, narrowing his eyes, "If you don't mind me asking. You have the face of a child."</p><p>"Twenty," I answered.</p><p>"That's older than you look but still a tad young, isn't it?" Lomax commented. "I mean, you've barely had time to live. What makes you want to devote your life to God so early?"</p><p>I had often been asked the same question but had never been so shy in answering it as when Kevin Lomax, with his dark secretive eyes, his boyish grin and all of those characteristics we label as handsome but cannot quite ever understand why, asked me. I feared him not liking me or thinking I was a silly little fool, I knew. I was not embarrassed by my God but more of myself and the reasons I could offer for having turned solely to Him for my companionship. "I wish to be closer to God. I have loved Him since I was a small child," I answered. "Throughout my life I've often felt misunderstood or alone. In His arms I feel both sufferings lightened."</p><p>I did not mention how I often still felt lonely and as if God had abandoned me in certain moments of my life just as he had momentatily left his Son to die on the cross. Nor did I say that the convent had still left me feeling misunderstood and alienated. There were outcasts everywhere in life it seemed, even in a house that proclaimed unconditional love and acceptance and I was forever to be such a creature.</p><p>Kevin smiled sadly. "Loneliness...yeah. I can understand that."</p><p>From his eyes, I could tell that he did. I watched him walking back behind his desk, where he sat and stared at me before motioning me to sit down. "What would God think of me if I kept one of his wives standing?" he asked.</p><p>I blushed. I wasn't comfortable with thinking of myself as a bride of God or Christ. For one thing, I didn't quite enjoy the thought of my Husband being a polygamist. That might have worked in the biblical days but I believed that God had made man to have only one woman to help him in his troubles and soothe his loneliness. I had become a nun to strengthen my relationship with God, not for it to become some pseudo romantic thing inside of my mind. He was my father not my lover. Sitting, I kept the thought to myself, not wishing to make the man seem small by contradicting him. You can push someone away by pointing out where they have wronged more than praising where they have succeeded, I had learnt.</p><p>Lomax was staring at me again. "I felt close to God in my childhood too," he said.</p><p>"You did?"</p><p>He nodded. "Yes. A little <em>too</em> close. My mother is a preacher's daughter. A real fundamentalist, Bible thumping, fire and brimstone type of woman. She had me when she was sixteen years old and unwed. I guess, without a real father she tried to impose the Heavenly one on me instead."</p><p>I could tell also from his tone, posture and eyes that the imposition had been unwanted. His fingers were touching each other's opposite and moving anxiously as his elbows rested on the armrests of his chair while his eyes bitterly examined the top of his desk.</p><p>"Why did you call for someone from the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart to be sent to you?" I asked confused. "Can't your mother offer solace? Or, forgive me for being too presumptuous, maybe you don't even truly seek comfort that is <em>spiritually</em> based?"</p><p>I blushed, realizing the double way that might sound, but Kevin Lomax ignored it, leaning forward and falling the tower made of his fingers. "I loved my wife Mary Ann very much. I want her to be somewhere and with a God I don't just see as some kind of ultimate Prankster, giving and then taking away. My mother...well I'm too used to her attack plan. Maybe with someone else it will be different."</p><p>His dark eyes held mine and I wanted to run for the door and back to the abbey, but I felt too moved by his words and his plea for help to refuse him.</p><p>"I am here," I simply said.</p><p>Kevin smiled. "I appreciate that more than you know. Now that we have been properly introduced, I will let you go. My work schedule is rather large these days. Truth is, I'm going to be made into a partner very soon. I just have to do something for John Milton, the head of the firm, first."</p><p>"You're wife would be proud," I said with a sincere smile.</p><p>Another flash of pain in his eyes as he looked unconvinced. "If my wife hadn't <em>died</em>, Sister Erin, I doubt very much that I'd even be here in this office."</p><p>I stood intinctively and grabbed his left hand, still adorning his gold wedding band, which was resting on the desk, and held it again. We both looked at it in a mixture of embarrassment and shame and I quickly brought my hand back to rest infront of my simple black nun's dress.</p><p>"I'll contact the abbey again soon to arrange our next meeting," Lomax said and stood. "Let me walk you to the door."</p><p>The man was polite but any air of comfort that had previously been between us had seemed to vanish and I could not understand why my touch had disturbed him as equally as it had me. My vows were racing through my head but the man could not know I was vaguely attracted to him. There also could be little possibility that he shared that attraction. I was too far beneath him and he was still very much grieving for his wife. Fat nuns proved far less temptation to handsome lawers than they posed in return to fat nuns, I suspected.</p><p>He opened the door for me and I started to back out of the doorway, my eyes staying on him. "It was so nice to see you again, Mr. Lomax," I bade him farewell.</p><p>"Kevin," he said, offering me a small but genuine smile, a return to his previous congeniality. "Call me Kevin."</p><p>"Kevin," I repeated with my own shy smile. "Remember, I am here to help," I stated and took a step backwards, my eyes were so fixed on Kevin Lomax I did not think to look behind me. My body bumped into someone else, whom was standing behind me in the doorway, and I felt a strange sensation in the collision of our bodies. It was both excruciatingly hot and numbingly cold. Not liking it, I unintentionally gave a small cry and moved forward, only to feel two hands take my elbows.</p><p>"Sorry," a man's voice said. "Stupid of me...I should have seen you standing there!"</p><p>I turned around to find a man in his fifties standing behind me. His coloring was similar to Kevin's, dark hair, brown eyes, but he was about four inches shorter and looked more of Italian decent. He was looking at me apologetically but I thought with a certain amusement underlying it as well.</p><p>"Oh shit you're a nun," he exclaimed with a laugh. "That did it: I'm going to hell."</p><p>"John Milton, this is Sister Erin; Sister Erin, this is my employer, John Milton," the lawyer stated, his voice now oddly flat. "The man I was telling you about."</p><p>"I hope it was all good," Milton said with a laugh, his hands remaining on my elbows.</p><p>"Oh yes," I said with a smile.</p><p>"I was just showing Sister Erin out," Kevin said. "She's come to offer me her spiritual assistance after Mary Ann's death."</p><p>Milton looked at Lomax more seriously now, still keeping his grip on me. "Is she what you are looking for, Kevin?"</p><p>"Yes," Kevin answered somberly and nodded. "She's exactly what I am looking for."</p><p>Something passed between the two men and my body felt hot in self consciousness, my soul similarly heated in embarrassment, as I wondered if they had discussed my coming beforehand, a fact that made me inexplicably disturbed for some unknowable reason.</p><p>John Milton returned his attention to me, smiling once more. "Kevin there has an eye for being able to read people. Why when he first came here, he chose perfect jurors for us. He knew just who should sit on the jury and who should get a free pass out of their mandatory duty. So if he thinks you're the right woman for him, you're the right woman for him. To help him out, I mean."</p><p>The man suddenly set me free and I felt both relieved by the act and his words. Once more backing out of the door, returning my gaze to Kevin, whom was staring at me, instead of John Milton, I professed, "Whatever I can do."</p><p>"Goodbye Sister Erin," Kevin said, his eyes seeming almost dead.</p><p>"Goodbye Kevin," I said, hurrying out.</p><p>Behind me I heard Milton saying, "Did you hear that? <em>Whatever</em> she can do," but I did not hear the rest, my feet moving quickly, trying to get back quickly to the abbey before the Reverend Mother scolded me for being late, and praying to God to help me heal the broken look in Kevin Lomax's eyes, a look which haunted me the second time experiencing it as much as it had done the first.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. An Offering of a Single Weed</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>I recall my first meeting with Kevin Lomax.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Back at the Abbey for the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, I received the lecture I had feared was waiting for me from the Reverend Mother. It hardly mattered to her that the traffic was bad or that the elevator was not working at Milton, Chadwick and Waters and I had needed to take the stairway down what had seemed like an endless flight of stairs. I sat in the older woman's study, surrounded by her own collection of art and books, in its own way as impressive as Kevin Lomax's, and was told that I should have left earlier, that I could have phoned or a thousand other things I <em>might</em> have considered doing if I had been more thoughtful or intelligent.</p><p>Sitting in the small wooden chair in her office, I would momentarily glance at the hands folded in my lap only for the Abbess to raise her voice and call my attention back to her.</p><p>"Sister Erin, need I remind you that we have bent certain rules to allow your entrance early, disregarding the fact that you were not born Catholic but converted when you were sixteen as well. You are relatively new to our faith and the respect you show it is contemptible."</p><p>I flinched, tears stinging my eyes. I held them, knowing that in my bed that night I would be allowed the time and privacy to shed them. "I am sorry, Reverend Mother," I apologized.</p><p>"You can make amends," she stated sternly, a scowl on her puffy and aged face. She then listed off what prayers to say before sleep to be granted forgiveness and to show my contrition. The instruction having been given, she studied me with the slightest trace of curiosity. "And how did your meeting with Mr. Lomax go?" she inquired, at last, and I knew the lecture had finally reached its conclusion.</p><p>"It went well," I reported. "He seems to be eager to find solace in God's welcoming his wife after her death. He just does not possess our faith yet."</p><p>"Yes, tragic, just tragic," the Reverend Mother stated standing and heading to stare out the window behind her desk. "It shocked everyone."</p><p>I still had not heard how Lomax's wife had died nor why it had been so scandalous the man had been surprised I had not recognized his name from the news stories. "May I ask, Reverend Mother," I started timidly, thinking of the words belonging to the man depicted walking on water in a painting on the woman's office walls: to ask and it should be given, to knock and it should be opened. "What exactly happened with Lomax's wife."</p><p>The nun turned around sharply and fixed me with a stare so cold and withering I felt my soul shrinking under both habit and skin. "You have been ignoring the more important areas of the paper for more amusing matters again."</p><p>"Yes," I admitted with regret.</p><p>The Abbess looked at me with a gaze that would have been all that was required to set fire to the wood that had set suspected witches ablaze in medieval days. "What are we to do with you, my child? I should punish you for your ignorance by extending it in regards to what happened to the man you have been assigned to assist spiritually."</p><p>I swallowed bitterly, wondering how I was supposed to possibly help the man when I knew so little about his torment and was afraid to ask him outright. The Reverend Mother's dark eyes crawled over my face,  like two angry fat beetles, until she tutted and finally remarked, " But since Lomax and his employer John Milton have promised a rather large donation to both the Abbey and the needy of New York for your counseling, I suppose it would be a most grievious sin to send such an ignorant guide to him."</p><p>My eyes widened in relief. "Thank you, Reverend Mother."</p><p>"You are most welcome child," she replied, looking guilty of the sin of pride. "There was some trouble after Lomax was made into a celebrity following his abandoning his client, Mr. Gettys, whom he found out was guilty of sexually mishandling one of his students."</p><p>I studied the Abbess' face while she said this. There had long been aspirations cast on the conduct of the Priests in our shared faith. Yet she did not so much as cringe or look at the words with the same repulsion I experienced at them.</p><p>"That was good of him," I said in respect for the handsome young lawyer.</p><p>"Yes," she remarked. "Miraculously he wasn't disbarred but was made into a cause celebre after a news story was published on him. A certain firm in Chicago wanted him and Kevin signed a deal with them only for his wife to become insanely jealous when she found out that Lomax had been showing undue attention to a certain other attorney at the firm. He claimed that the woman was harassing him...some strange story of how they were familiar with one another from the past, although from all of the reporters digging they were never able to unearth how. The woman, a Christabella Andreoli, had previously been working at Milton, Chadwick and Waters before having been transferred to Chicago."</p><p>"Was the firm in Chicago related to the one in New York?" I inquired.</p><p>"Yes," the woman replied, looking at me as if I had just farted in her office. "But Kevin Lomax claimed he had not known that after the tragedy."</p><p>"What was the tragedy?" I asked close to impatience.</p><p>"Mary Ann Lomax killed Andreoli after discovering she could not bear children," the Mother Reverend stated with pious pity. "She invited the female lawyer to the house on a Sunday, when her husband was working, stabbed her with a butcher's knife, cut the ovaries out of the woman and then sat on the floor of her condo in Park Towers eating them. When Kevin Lomax returned home to find the grisly scene, Mary Ann repeatedly remarked that she took an eye for an eye, claiming her rival had made her infertile. While trying to calm his wife down, she ran to the rooftop and fell from it while he was trying to subdue her."</p><p>"Did she take her own life?" I asked.</p><p>The Abbess looked at me with utmost severity. "If she had, we would not allow you to comfort Mr. Lomax's fears regarding his wife's fate Sister Erin; we know what happens to those whom committ suicide, don't we?"</p><p>I shook my head in sorrow but was confused. "Why was Mary Ann Lomax interned at Trinity?" I inquired. "She died in Chicago and Kevin Lomax was originally from Florida, I think, why bury her in New York?"</p><p>"John Milton insisted," the Reverend Mother stated.</p><p>"Why?"</p><p>The Abbess only stopped short of rolling her eyes. "Hearing of the tragedy he immediately offered Lomax a better paying position at his own personal organization in New York. Benevolent and understanding soul that he is, Milton understood that the widower would wish to pay his respects someplace close to his new place of work instead of Mary Ann's birthplace. John Milton was the one whom paid for the memorial we witnessed that day on our visitation to the cemetary."</p><p>I bit my bottom lip in consternation. Some things seemed far clearer, the cause of the haunted and sad look in the young lawyer's eyes for one. Having returned home to find your wife eating part of a coworker, only to watch as she committed what might have been suicide, would leave your soul tormented by what ifs and a fear that the person you loved was truly lost forever. But there were so many things that seemed disturbing about the whole story. It left me with an instinct to leave it alone and turn my back on it before similar dark madness might claim me.</p><p>Just as I preferred the comics to the real life horrors which dominated the rest of the newspapers.</p><p>I supposed that there was a lesson that God was trying to teach me, however, and hoped that He would show it to me in time and give me the intelligence to see what the truth behind it all really was.</p><p>"Now that you know," the Reverend Mother said, "I pray that you won't be prying Mr. Lomax too much about it but will let him reveal to you what he will when he will."</p><p>"Yes," I agreed.</p><p>She nodded and eyed me somberly. "Go and dine with the other Sisters. Then meet for the evening prayers and follow it with an early prayer and contemplation in your quarters. Go!"</p><p>I nodded and hurried from the room, muttering a "Bless you," which caused an odd smile to cross her lips.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Back in my room, my prayers finished and my body adorning a simple nightgown under the sparse and prickly wool blankets on my bed, I thought of the Reverend Mother's revelation regarding Kevin Lomax's past. It was difficult to think of the handsome, friendly and good natured attorney having suffered such a horror only a short time ago which might have destroyed a weaker man. That he could still smile seemed one of God's many mysteries and as unexplainable as why He allowed such tragedy to occur on the world He had built.</p><p>But He did allow both beauty and ugliness and it was up to His children to find out why.</p><p>If I had heard of the tragedy which had taken place,  I was sure it would have stayed in my mind. Murder, cannibalism and accidental death...Yet, even if I had, it would have been impossible for me to have recognized the name Lomax.</p><p>Remembering the day of my first meeting with the man, I closed my eyes and relived it, once again, trying to find answers that remained as elusive as God's reasoning and decisions...</p><p>* * *</p><p>Walking through the Trinity Church Cemetary and Mausoleum in Manhattan, we were a long line of nuns in full regalia, made to look simple yet standing out terribly because it caught anyone whom looked in our direction's full attention. Our outfits were simple, possessing only the two neutral colors, and I was fully aware that this was how antiquated everybody saw our version of the world: black and white, good and evil. They believed that we held inside our minds no room for shades of gray and all the little shaded areas which could be found in a human soul and what led them to make any decision.</p><p>The day was overcast, a thick cover of cloud only showing a glimpse of the blue sky behind it now and then. In contrast, the sky above the Anglican cemetery had been a bright eruption of red, gold and orange. The leaves on the trees had started to change and now it looked almost like a circus tent of warm colors alighted over the cemetary many of us felt we should not even been in. Sister Johanne, five years older than myself, had questioned the Reverend Mother in the self righteous tone that marked her speech. Trinity was not a Catholic cemetery and she believed our grace should only be given to those whom belonged to our specific faith, the one set up long before by those in Rome not by a rebel from Germany. The Reverend Mother had stated that it would show the mercy of our Abbey if we were seen visiting the resting place of those whom were not Catholic. This seemed to close Johanne's usually flapping lips for a few minutes, although Sister Caroline, a girl around my own age and close to my size as well, kept looking at the graves surrounding us with a certain condescending pity which most of the other sisters seemed to share.</p><p>Each of us had been given a bouquet of flowers to place on a grave and show respect. At the tail end of our parade of penguins, I watched as every one of my fellow Sisters bestowed their bouquets on the chosen graves. Some chose those graves which were opulent and rich. Others chose the poorest graves. Certain sisters would offer their bouquet to an old grave, claiming it was best to do so because it had been fogotten. Others would lose the flowers in their hands to fresh ones, stating those dead still had loved ones left alive to grieve. The ages of the deceased varied as well. Some women mourned for those whom were far on in age and others saved their sympathy for the youngest. Behind them all, and rarely noticed, only to be reminded that I did not fit in, it went unregarded, as I desired it would, that I was leaving a single flower from my bouquet at any grave that I felt compelled to. I did not look at the names, numbers or anything else engraved on the marble or stone but went by the feeling inside of my heart and soul.</p><p>Endlessly the Reverend Mother marched us through the cemetery  and I was reminded of the old childrens book of Madeleine, the nuns leading their young students down the streets of Paris. I felt as if we were being put on display, suddenly, like show dogs. Perhaps we really are being made into an advertisement for Catholic tolerance, I thought almost sadly, not liking the thought of compassion being used only to serve as an act to make church attendence larger. My thoughts went to my Lord whom taught not to let your left hand know the actions of its counterpart's or to do things from the heart and not for show or praise, like the Pharisees he had hated for their self righteousness. Of course, maybe the Reverend Mother was only trying to be as sly as a serpent but as innocent as a dove, I reasoned, chastising myself for my harsh judgement of her. It was so hard to know what anyone was thinking, I had contemplated, finding it a good thing that God could see into the human heart better than I, since it was often so hidden.</p><p>Looking to the sky, about to plead with God to bless me also with such similar understanding, lest I sin against the Mother again or my Sisters, regretting my unkind thoughts and feelings for Sisters Johanne and Caroline, I saw the leaves above my head again and felt for a moment as if a Devil's Paintbrush was blooming in the sky as punishment for my sins. I stopped for one second, staggering in my simple shoes, hidden by a dress too long, for, not only had I become dizzy, but more than that, I had become frightened. My mother's long past words of the Devil painting his hell with the shades found in a red daisy returned to me and I felt trapped under a brush far larger than the small flowers which had grown around my house. The air smelt of smoke, as it often does when Autumn has come in her preparation for the death of Summer and the barrenness of Winter. That crisp scent of burning and the foliage bearing the varying colors of flames, I felt for a second as if I were trapped under the petals of the weed which had both frightened and fascinated me during my childhood. I looked to the patches of darkening gray sky, appearing through the branches or to the same gray clouds beside the trees, where I saw them more visible, for relief from the sensation of being consumed. I quickly rushed forward to catch up to the other Sisters, having fallen too far behind.</p><p>"Just a little further," the Reverend Mother had informed us as I tried to keep my balance. "We've almost made it around the Graveyard's full expanse."</p><p>My feet were telling me it was true. It seemed we had been down every path and paraded around every inch of the cemetery. I was sure my dreams that night would be of markers sticking out from the grass, like stony fingernails of some concrete giant trying to burst from the earth.</p><p>The Reverend Mother marched us casually by a man whom was paying his respects to a grave, obviously a new one. The stranger was standing with his head lowered as he stared at the bare earth of the resting place, his hands held deep in the pockets of his long trenchcoat. I noticed as the Sisters before me each stopped to offer him a gaze, one that lingered as they passed him by. Some of the girl's eyes rested on him longer and I knew it was because they appreciated a handsome man when they encountered him, vows to devote themselves to God having been made, temporarily like myself or permanently, or not. His hair was dark brown, bordering on black. Lips full and set in a sorrowful frown as he stared at the final resting place of the person he had loved and lost. Whomever it was, they had veen placed by a fence of black iron with a group of trees above a very expensive looking memorial featuring a male angel.</p><p>Turning to look at the mourner's eyes, I noticed that he was looking from the grave to us. The brown iris and black pupil shifted easily from the center of his eye to its corner as he eyed the line of nuns being paraded by him with some unknown, secretive gaze. Above his head was a Canadian Maple, the type I had seen throughout my childhood, bearing the same colors as the Devil's Paintbrush and this made me frightened of the man, whom possessed an innocence despite the darkness of his good looks. The tree was a mystery for it contained all the shades at once, red, yellow and orange, and it felt like a miracle from the Devil, him working his artistry once more and I feared it had touched the man in the beige coat and expensive suit underneath it.</p><p>My companions were each mourning the fact that they had already been bereaved of their bouquets so they could not stop and offer it to the stranger. Feeling one flower left to me, small and at the bottom of the paper which had once held a mixture of wildflowers, opposed to the other Sisters collections of roses, lilies, gardenias and chrysanthemums, I held off from giving the last flower to a mourner simply because he was handsome.</p><p>Suddenly, the man did not simply dart his eyes to intake the nuns walking by him. His eyes met mine in the cemetery filled with stone statues, seen, and the rotting bodies of the dearly departed, thankfully unseen below the soil, and I saw in his eyes the same lost sorrow I would see in his office days later when we were properly introduced for the first time. Whoever the man was, he was in pain, though, he was desperately trying to survive it. His look was a plea not only to be helped but to be saved as well. Then I realized that he had not been <em>blessed</em> by the Devil's Paintbrush above him but <em>cursed </em>by it instead. I passed him as these thoughts went through my mind and the weight of that one flower left in my hand suddenly felt too heavy.</p><p>"Oh," I gasped, a curse of my cowardly self and never meant to be set free as I turned around to run back to the man to offer him my final gift of compassion.</p><p>Seeing me rushing back to him, the dark stranger looked as if he had expected my return. My hand had been dipping into the paper cone for the one simple flower left and as I came to stand before him, feeling too plain and fat in his presence, another feeling to be repeated again, I gasped as I pulled out the last flower to see one that matched the leaves above us.</p><p>The leaves seemed to flash in their canopy as did the Devil's Paintbrush held in my pudgy fingers and I was about to apologize for offering him a weed, and one bearing such a name, when he took it from my hand and tossed it gently on the grave before us. As it fell, a multitude of leaves imitated the weeds descent, falling from the Maple though no breeze brushed my face or could have caused their fall. The angel, looked at me and I believed I saw a sadistic tilt to the carving of his brows and a slight twirl to the side of his lips, his tongue slightly protruding out. I looked down to the grave stone to read the name of the departed and found my vision blurred. I could not focus though I tried and my eyes went to the dark one's of the mourner,  only to find him staring at me with the same sadness as before. He bore the weight of some great sorrow and I instantly thought of the many eyes I had seen either sculpted or painted of the Savior on the cross, left to die alone in spirit on a piece of wood, the same substance he had spent the first years of his life working in, having its revenge along with man's. The stranger was looking at me in pain and desolation and a pity I could not comprehend.</p><p>"SISTER ERIN!" I heard the Reverend Mother calling out and though I turned to find the procession of nuns having stopped to look at me in disapproval, I felt the suited man's eyes staying on me.</p><p>I turned back to him, glimpsing the angel again, whose mouth was shut and flat and whose brows seemed mournful rather than cruel. Meeting the mourner's brown eyes, I whispered, "God bless and love you."</p><p>"Thank you," he said in his country accent and offered me a sad little smile which had caused a small crack inside of my heart.</p><p>I suffered extreme guilt and overwhelming happiness as I ran back to the other Sisters, whom spent the rest of the day teasing me for having fallen for the first handsome man we had come across in the cemetery and having offered him my flowers.</p><p>They had not seen that I had only offered him one and a weed at that.</p><p>And they did not know it had been his sorrow that had moved me far more than his beauty.</p><p>I would not tell them.</p><p>They would not believe me anyway.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Back in my room, I thought of the fact that Mary Ann's name had been hidden from me on the stone a male angel kept constant watch over while her husband was off living his life without her. If I had seen it, I would never have accepted the Reverend Mother's request to help a successful Manhattan Lawyer deal with his grief. The other Sisters taunts had been correct in the fact that I was attracted to the man. I was not attracted to every handsome man I saw. During my youth I could make it through a Sears catalogue without finding myself blushing over a single male model, even those in the underwear section. But Kevin Lomax had made my heart burn as brightly as the leaves on the trees or the Devil's Paintbrush I had offered for his wife's grave.</p><p>Turning on my side, I discovered I had started crying after all, but was unsure if it was because of the lecture I had received earlier from the Reverend Mother or because of the damned look in Kevin's eyes that co-existed with his sorrow. The man held no more hope in Heaven for his dead wife Mary Ann than he did for himself.</p><p>"Please, God," I prayed in a hushed tone. "Let me save Kevin Lomax and show him Your kindness and mercy. I will do anything. Anything."</p><p>I could not know that God would hold me more accountable to my word than even the Devil himself.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Not sure how my updates will go this week and next. I have to work on a gift fic for my sister. I have a doctor's appointment and I'm nervous about a lump on my ear that is getting larger. Hopefully I've just been sleeping on it. :/</p><p>Plus, I want to start on a special entry in this series for Keanu's Birthday next week. I'm happy about that one. That said, I'm gonna try to update often still. These stories are my little bit of Heaven. :D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Make One Sin, Let Him In</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>While I attend to Kevin Lomax's counseling, I experience a strange loss of time...</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>My first few meetings with Kevin Lomax went as I had expected they would. Time was limited, seeing as though Kevin was handling an important case involving a woman accused of killing her husband and his mistress. Even though it was in the papers, I still could not bring myself to read about it, much to the probable consternation of the Reverend Mother. I had not talked to her since our meeting in the office. Seeing the man for a few minutes here and there we talked a bit about Heaven, the Lord's promise of forgiveness and salvation, and on a more personal note, our backgrounds. The lawer did this more than myself, my shyness inhibiting my speech, along with his attractiveness and the fact that I honestly could not help myself from liking him, even if his words often betrayed an irreverence and anger towards his fundamentalist mother and the God she had forced on him as a substitute father.</p><p>"Did you ever meet your biological father?" I asked him one day as we were sitting side by side on the expensive leather couch in his office.</p><p>"Yeah," Kevin Lomax stated, frowning. "Not too long ago but it feels like a <em>very</em> long time...turns out he's been keeping an eye on me since I was born."</p><p>"You aren't pleased?" I said, not sure what to think about the situation had I been in his shoes. My own father's abandonment may have made me lean towards being flattered.</p><p>Kevin shook his head bitterly. "Turns out some people only show up in your life when they are after something," he spat the words but whispered them as well, as if he was afraid his father might be watching even now and he risked being overheard.</p><p>"Is he still in your life?" I asked.</p><p>"Yeah," Kevin stated in defeat. "Dear old dad turned out to be harder to get rid of then I expected. Make one sin, let him in."</p><p>The hottest new attorney for Milton, Chadwicke and Waters looked terribly sad again and also beaten and I clasped the hand resting on his knee. His dark eyes went to them linked together and breathed heavily, half grateful and half disturbed by my touch. I swallowed and was about to let his hand go when he grasped it in return, preventing the action. "So tell me, Sister Erin, what was your earthly father like?"</p><p>Staring into eyes that seemed hopelessly innocent yet unnervingly wise, I lowered my head. "My dad was there for both my sister and my own childhood. When my mom divorced, he paid for support for a while and then stopped. The area was small, we saw him often but we might as well have been strangers."</p><p>"Divorced?" Kevin said in confusion. "I thought Catholics..."</p><p>"I converted shortly before joining the sisterhood," I told him, almost in embarrassment.</p><p>When I looked up into Kevin's eyes again he was looking sadly at me once more, with a weird hint of desperate hysterics. "If you stayed Protestant you wouldn't be a nun...why the <em>Hell</em> did you decide to...sorry." He winced, realizing he had sworn in front of me.</p><p>I smiled, trying to indicate that it was okay. "I liked the ritual, I guess. The devotion."</p><p>"And the closeness?"</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>"My mother was close to God and she <em>wasn't</em> a Catholic nun," he stated. "You didn't need to be one."</p><p>"I..."</p><p>"Forgive me," he apologized, seeing my distress. "You're here to help me, not to be interrogated about your life choices."</p><p>I pulled my hand out from his grasp but he found it almost instantly. "Please, forgive me," he whispered, his repentant expression genuine and contrite.</p><p>"Okay," I whipered.</p><p>Kevin Lomax held both my hand and my gaze with his look. And unfortunately a piece of my heart, as well.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Another visit found the man standing by the large window behind his desk, viewing the city spread out before himand telling me of the tragedy another city had witnessed.</p><p>"I found her just sitting on the floor eating Christabella's ovary like it was a Chicago style dog she had picked up at the vendor on the corner. Blood was trailing down her chin, and she was looking so pleased with herself, like a little child eating the first cookie she'd ever baked with her mom."</p><p>"How long had Mary Ann known she couldn't have children?"</p><p>"She had just found out a little beforehand. But I don't understand...it wasn't supposed to go like that again..."</p><p>"Again?" I asked from my favorite spot on the black, leather couch.</p><p>"I don't...nevermind," the man said, not bothering to turn and look at me but obviously in agony. I took his incoherence to be an attribute to the strength of his grief and all that he had endured. "All I know was that Christabella was dead, which I was grateful for in a way, and Mary Ann was a broken, bloody crumple of bones and gore on the street outside of the tower a few minutes later. And there I was still alive and feeling like a failure again."</p><p>I did not question him about his usage of the same word. Feeling like a failure wasn't a new idea for me. Not a week seemed to pass by that did not bring that feeling to me once or a hundred times over. I just constantly prayed that I would not fail in helping Kevin Lomax.</p><p>"Did you wish to join her?" I asked, familiar with the impulse of self detruction, unfortunately, as well.</p><p>"No, I wanted something worse," Kevin said, his voice as flat and dead as the woman he had loved and pledged himself to that horrible day which consumed his thoughts. "I wanted to be <em>damned</em>."</p><p>Instinctively, I stood and joined him by the window. I saw both our reflections, the tall, lean handsome man in the suit beside the shorter, plump, younger woman in the habit. We made an odd couple and I felt horribly lacking again, an ugly duckling beside a swan. "But you came to the Sisters for help after you saw us that day in the cemetery...you <em>want</em> to be saved."</p><p>I watched the glassy, reversed Kevin smirk. "If only you knew, Sister Erin."</p><p>I sighed. "There is much that I <em>don't</em> know."</p><p>The half smile vanished from off of Lomax's face. "I think we'll end up teaching each other: You with I and I with you..."</p><p>We stared out at the city for a little while longer and I wondered if the angels were watching over us, as we in return watched over the city, or if they might not have flown away long ago when we dared to make buildings tall enough to touch their skies, like the people of Babel trying in vain to reach God.</p><p>* * *</p><p>It was on my sixth visit with Kevin Lomax that my fall from grace began.</p><p>The same sky I felt we had made the angels jealous by reaching started to pour raindrops unexpectedly down on me when I was only halfway to Milton, Chadwicke and Waters. The weather had not called for it and I had not brought an umbrella. To make matters worse, no bus nor taxi seemed to see me calling to them in need but only passed on by. By the time, I reached the law firm, I felt a storm cloud myself, all black and frowning, feeling miserable and soaked. When I walked into Kevin's office, he looked at me with pity and a naughty boy's amusement and seed of rebellion at seeing an authoritarian symbol dripping wet. He walked towards me to have a closer look, an opportunity too priceless to deny.</p><p>"Let me take it, you got soaked?" the man said in his strong southern twang.</p><p>"Yes," I said.</p><p>"Don't worry, from what I heard penguins are real good swimmers if there's a flood."</p><p>"Ha ha," I retaliated flatly. "I'm not worried about that, God gave us a rainbow to tell us there would be no more of those."</p><p>"Yeah, I used to tell mom God was frowning over the world 'cause He promised not to wipe us all out again. He's gotta do it individually now."</p><p>I sneezed then, narrowly avoiding hitting the man standing in front of me after the warning signal of my nose tingling unpleasantly.</p><p>"God bless you," Kevin said. "Hey, look! I got to say it for a change!"</p><p>His eyes looked at my habit, which seemed to have become a sponge, and his amusement became more softer. "Get out of that before you catch pneumonia," he said, beginning to remove my veil.</p><p>"No!" I said. "I'd better not. The Reverend Mother..."</p><p>"Would want her sweetest little angel dying from a cold? Besides, if you willingly stay wet doesn't that make a case of potential suicide?"</p><p>I sighed as Kevin finished removing the rest of the veil and whimple and stared at me, taken aback as my slightly wet hair fell around my shoulders in brown-auburn strands, some of which resembled corkcrews. "Your...your hair...it's curly," he stated, his voice thick.</p><p>"Is that bad?" I asked. I had always liked my curls but had heard so many other women complain about their own. Once a woman had asked me if I was jealous because my sister had straight hair instead of my curly, wavy mass of hair. When I had told her truthfully that I liked my curls, she had seemed disappointed I hadn't been upset and envious. Her question had disturbed me, though. Just another instance making me feel inferior to everyone else, even if I had liked the object in question before. If Kevin Lomax hated my hair, though, I knew that I really would end up wishing it was straight. Which was stupid and silly because it hardly mattered what the widower thought of it.</p><p>I was only his <em>Sister</em> after all.</p><p>But the question was out before I could take it back and Lomax was shaking his head in denial. "I like curly hair...Mary Ann's was curled. So was Christabella's."</p><p>The lawyer had not talked too much about the latter, although I had heard a bit about his wife, whom he had obviously adored. I wondered if there was some truth to Mary Ann Lomax's fear that her husband had been having an affair with the other lawyer. Perhaps, I should have asked him, taking the bullet of guilt from out of his soul in order to start the healing process and God's forgiveness. But Kevin had grabbed one of my curls and was playing with it, twirling it around his finger. "I...I didn't know your hair was curled. Why do you want to hide something so beautiful under that damn thing all the time?" he asked dazed.</p><p>"We are not supposed to be vain," I told him. "Vanity is a sin so we hide anything that might lead us astray."</p><p>"I wish I would have remembered that," he said thoughtfully. "But your hair, Erin, really is beautiful...It doesn't make sense to me...why God would want you to hide something so pretty..."</p><p>Staring at his face, I thought of the same reasoning with him. Why God would ever desire to make someone as handsome as Kevin Lomax only to hide his face under a mask would be ridiculous. Suddenly the things I had been taught didn't seem to make any bit of sense to me in that simple regard.</p><p>Coming back to his senses, Kevin focused on the part of the wet habit I was still wearing. "We have to get you dried off," he stated and left me to walk back towards his desk and intercom.</p><p>"Ms. Arlington, I need a robe brought in here, ASAP. And I'll be giving you somethings to put in the washer and drier."</p><p>I began to argue but Kevin put a hand up silencing me. Following the request, he pointed in the direction of a door and instructed, "Use my personal washroom to take the rest of your things off." It must have been one of the perks of being in line to become a partner, I thought, as he added, "I'll hand you the robe when it comes."</p><p>Nodding, something in his dark eyes too confident to refuse, I headed to where his finger had been aimed, opened the door and walked inside.</p><p>The washroom was comfortable in size, made mostly of black marble and even contained a shower. Art prints adorned the walls, mostly of Italian settings, although there were some unusual prints of fire amonst them. Towels of alternating black and white were on a rack although there was a hand drier as well. I took off my habit as quickly as possible and the wet undergarments underneath too, until I was naked. The large mirror showed my reflection and I hated the sight of myself, avoiding looking at it by turning my naked body around so the only thing reflected would be my back, which I would not see.</p><p>A rapping on the door soon came. "Sister Erin?"</p><p>I ran to it and stared out its sliver of an opening into Kevin's eyes. "Here," he said, pushing a red colored robe inside. My mind reeled as I realized it was the same shade as the flower I had placed on the grave belonging to the man's beloved wife. Quickly I handed him my wet clothes, still dripping on to the washroom's tiled floor.</p><p>"Get dressed and then come out," he stated, closing the foor before I could argue.</p><p>Sighing, I put the robe on and then walked over to the hand drier, placing my head beneath it to help dry my wet hair. The force was so strong it didn't take long to finish, and gathering my courage, I walked back to Kevin Lomax's office to wait for my clothes to be dried. As I emerged from the washroom, I noted that the rain outside had stopped almost as quickly as it had arrived. Kevin spun around from his desk, where he was looking over files for his case, to see me, and I held the robe shut at the top and the bottom, fearing it would pull open and reveal too much.</p><p>"Wait over on the couch," he said with a smile, his eyes studying me in the robe. I did and after a few seconds, he commented without looking at me, "You look like that flower you left on Mary Ann's grave: the Devil's Paintbrush. A red daisy."</p><p>"It was the last one in my bouquet," I explained. "The Reverend Mother gave each Sister one with the order to leave them on a grave. I couldn't choose one so I left a single flower on whichever graves moved me most. Your wife's was the last. I didn't mean any offense...because of the name."</p><p>"None taken," he said, meeting my eyes.</p><p>I smiled. "Truth be told, I always rather liked them. They grew around my house. I knew that I shouldn't, but they were always so pretty... My mother made me feel like they were evil because of the name and the color. But, I guess, looking at it now, it doesn't make much sense "</p><p>"How's that?" Kevin asked, coming to lean against the edge of the front of his desk to stare at me.</p><p>"Red <em>can't</em> be the Devil's color," I replied. "God made blood, it is inside each of us, and it's life, as He said. It's only when it is spilt that it's wrong."</p><p>"When we <em>see</em> it," Kevin mused thoughtfully. "Like your pretty hair..."</p><p>He was staring at it, noting how I had dried it and the curls now lay fluffy on my shoulders. Once again, his eyes looked at me wearing the bright red robe and I found them lingering for too long on my breasts and my not unpleasant looking legs peeking out from the bottom of the robe. His gaze held appreciation and to my happiness, and subsequent self reproach, a bit of hunger. I felt the area between one of the places where his eyes stayed longer than they should burn with the same heat as the pictures of flame on the washroom walls and my cheeks burned the color of the robe, wanting him to stare forever.</p><p>Then the door opened and John Milton suddenly stepped in without knocking.</p><p>"Kevin, I needed to speak to you about the..."</p><p>His eyes immediately rested on his favored employee, leaning against his desk and staring at the big girl half naked on the couch. "But if I'm <em>interrupting </em>anything..."</p><p>"No," Kevin said, standing up straight. "Sister Erin was trapped in the rain. I had Ms. Arlington bring her a robe while her clothes dry."</p><p>The older man walked in, staring at me in a way that made me solely uncomfortable as opposed to Kevin's which had made me excited at the same time. "You look like a Maple Leaf almost...when it's turning red," Milton said. "You know what I'm talking about. Kevin here told me you use to live up north."</p><p>"Yes," I said with a shy nod.</p><p>"Kevin here comes from down <em>south</em>...Florida...you know what Florida looks like, right?"</p><p>I swallowed and felt my cheeks burning the shade of a crimson coated rose, suffering the image of a penis flashing through my mind and seeing it be the one belonging to Kevin Lomax. In my vision, it was the same shade as the robe I had been given and the Devil's Paintbrush. I couldn't get the image out of my mind easily, nor the image of it entering the place the attorney had been trying to glimpse through the opening of my robe, the same spot that had become enflamed from his gaze.</p><p>"JOHN!" Kevin snapped, apparently seeing the effect his question had made on me.</p><p>"Sorry!" John Milton said, holding up his hands. "She just looked so pretty sitting there in that robe, I forgot she was a nun for a second. I couldn't help myself." When the man met my eyes, I knew, however, that he had never forgotten at all. My embarrassment was what he had been after and nothing else. "Am I absolved?" he asked.</p><p>"If you truly <em>want</em> to be," I returned, a detatched shield going up to protect me from my humiliation.</p><p>Milton eyed me with curiousity and placed his hands in front of himself. "You...you have a young face but there's an old soul in those big innocent eyes of yours. She reminds me of you, Kevin," the man stated and looked at his employee from over his shoulder. "I'd watch out for her."</p><p>Though I thought the remark was made in jest, I couldn't help but feel that the head of the firm was also being part earnest.</p><p>"What did you want to speak to me about?" Kevin Lomax remarked and there was a strong cold wind of hostility to his tone.</p><p>"Nothing, it can wait," his boss stated. "Here...right here...I see a perfect opportunity to make some headway in the very reason why you called this young woman here, Kevin. We all know at Milton Chadwicke and Waters how important your time with Sister Erin is...and what you hope to accomplish for us <em>all</em>."</p><p>They exchanged a look that was somber and I wondered how much everyone at the firm knew about the widower's current struggle with his loss. It must have been a real family company and one that truly cared for each other if they were willing to let Kevin postpone business affairs for more personal matters.</p><p>"See you, Sister Erin," John Milton said.</p><p>I tried not to shiver watching him leave.</p><p>After the man had left, Kevin came and sat beside me on the couch, seeming very concerned. In shyness, I glanced at the clock on the other side of the room, above the book shelf. "I am so sorry if he made you uncomfortable," he apologized, taking my hands again and earning my attention. I liked the care so much obviously revealed in his eyes and the soft, compassionate tone in his voice.</p><p>"Some people don't know any better," I remarked, not sure if John Milton was one of them.</p><p>"And John Milton is not one of them," Kevin Lomax said, giving voice to my thoughts.</p><p>"Why do you work for him?" I asked.</p><p>"You <em>forget</em>," Kevin Lomax said, staring into my eyes, as lost as he ever was despite my weeks worth of counseling. "I <em>want</em> to be damned."</p><p>His eyes were such a beautiful shade of brown, deep and warming that I felt as if I was falling into them, splitting in two and sliding further finally into the black pit at their cores, becoming mesmerized or some other feeling close to falling in love. In the distance, I thought I heard someone calling for help but I could not move to help her.</p><p>Besides she was only me.</p><p>Blinking twice, I came to my senses, suddenly turning to look at the clock which read fifteen minutes later than what it felt like it should be. I had only glimpsed the clock about a minute before, I felt, and could not understand how I had misread it so terribly. "I...I need to start heading back to the Abbey...I didn't know."</p><p>My throat felt sore and my lips felt strange as I spoke, tingling and almost bruised, I brought my free hand to them. They felt enflamed. I swiftly turned back to look at Kevin and I noticed his full lips also looked red and sore.</p><p>"Do you?" he asked, his voice husky yet his eyes filled with a return of regret and sadness. He wanted me to stay yet wished I had never come at all, it seemed.</p><p>"Yes," I replied.</p><p>Looking to my side, I saw that my nun's habit was lying folded on the table. I could not remember when it had been brought in, the memory was not there and I brought a hand to my forehead in confusion, one of my curly strands of hair falling forward. Kevin caught it between his fingers and wrapped it around them once before he placed it gently behind my ear. "Get dressed in the washroom, Erin," he said, forgetting to call me Sister.</p><p>I quickly stood and grabbed my clothing, pressing it to my chest and realizing that this felt odd too. Rushing into the washroom, I saw Kevin still sitting on the couch and not looking at me. I went to place my habit on the edge of the sink only to miscalculate this too. Bending to pick them up, I experienced the same strange discomfort on my large chest. Standing upright again, I placed the habit more safely on the sink and stared at myself in the large mirror above it. My eyes looked very wide and I became a real life Margaret Keane painting reflected in the mirror to stand out crashly amongst the other more refined pieces of art. The lips on the shocked and scared woman in the mirror resembled those of Kevin Lomax, red and enflamed by friction. Impulsively, I opened the top of the robe to see that my nipples bore the same raw look, appearing as if they had been suckled on for several minutes a piece. Hickey's welts and cuts made by lips and teeth marked the pale, mountainous space around them, along with the indents caused by fingernails, ones which resembled crescent moons.</p><p>Something felt strange between my legs, a small rivlet running down my thigh and I rushed towards the toilet to wipe the area down below with some toilet paper. When I brought the wad of paper to eye level, I saw it covered with cream.</p><p><em>"You got too aroused by Milton's dirty remark and thinking of Kevin Lomax's penis,"</em> my inner voice reasoned.<em> "You became wet...you might be a nun but you are still a woman; your body has not forgotten that."</em></p><p>"But my chest, my lips," I said aloud and ran back to the mirror, only to see my nipples back to their normal pink shade and the welts and bruises having faded back leaving only normal flesh. My lips were no longer raw either but perfectly normal.</p><p><em>"You're too impressionable,"</em> I heard the Reverend Mother chastising.<em> "Your mind turns to sex and you imagine things...good thing you came to us so we could save you..."</em></p><p>"Yes," I said, leaning against the sink. "Yes."</p><p>* * *</p><p>Kevin had been sitting behind his desk when I came out dressed back in the habit. He only offered me a brief glance and I found him on the phone, deep in a heated conversation. Not knowing what else to do, I walked to the door, my footfalls made heavy with a sudden loneliness and shame.</p><p>"Wait just a moment," I heard Kevin say to whomever was on the other end, as I opened the door to leave. "SISTER ERIN!" he called out and I turned around to see him staring at me with a certain type of sorrowful fondness. "Take care. Stay dry. I still wish I could see your hair everyday..."</p><p>Following this unusual farewell, he returned to his phone call but when I left my heart was lighter and I felt more happy, even if I heard Kevin's voice stop on the other side of the door as soon as I shut it behind me, as If he had been talking to no one at all.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Drifting off to sleep that night several visions flashed through my mind...</p><p>Kevin Lomax leaning forward as I had been lost inside his eyes.</p><p>Him kissing me passionately on the couch before forcing me down on it while I asked him to stop.</p><p>The lawyer's hands opening my robe and his eyes viewing my large imperfect body with hunger.</p><p>The man saying, "It doesn't make sense to me...why God would want you to hide something so pretty..." before he began to devour my breasts, his hands grabbing them roughly.</p><p>My clit and cunt responding against my wishes at the softness of his tongue, the harshness of his teeth, and the pressure of his lips and suction of his mouth falling somewhere in between.</p><p>"No Kevin...No," my voice pleading to no avail. My screams for help filling the office, impossible not to be overheard in the surrounding corridors and offices at Milton, Chadwicke and Waters while I begged for my friend to stop, yet nobody coming to save me.</p><p>Screams slowly turning from ones of pain and betrayal to finally cries of pleasure as my genitals overwhelmed my senses, the pleasure making them swell helplessly and wonderfully until my body suddenly convulsed and the whole ordeal was over.</p><p>Kevin Lomax holding me all too gently afterwards as I cried in the wake of the violent orgasm he had given to me, his cock pressing against my tummy.</p><p>And some knowledge inside my head, heart and soul while my arms held him in return during my unwanted afterglow: that a part of me had wanted and enjoyed what he had done to me.</p><p>I fell asleep, an act similar to falling into Kevin Lomax's eyes, and one which brought with it a wave of forgetting. As I lost consciousness and memory, Kevin Lomax and John Milton said in unison inside of my head:</p><p>"Make one sin, let him in."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Still not sure when my next update for the 8 ongoing stories in this series will be...Keanu's Birthday is on Wednesday and I want to get started on his B-Day fic! :D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. The Shared Gaze of Sinners in a Courthouse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Struggling with my confusion over our last meeting, I am nervous when the Kevin Lomax requests I meet him at the New York Supreme Court Building after his trial is adjourned for the day.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was a while before I saw Kevin Lomax again.</p><p>The Reverend Mother informed me that he was busy with the trial of the accused murderous wife and had requested that she extend to me his sincere apology for putting a momentary hiatus to our counseling sessions. The older woman peered down at me with the same condescending gaze I associated with her. I was fearing that she would ask me what had been troubling me since my last session with the man and was relieved when she simply commented, "You have made quite the impression on that young man, Sister Erin. He says that you are helping him a great deal."</p><p>"If I am, I am pleased to hear it," I replied but the words felt almost dead inside of my mouth. A fact which was linked to my next confession. "But...I don't believe that I am. He still hasn't told me that I have changed his doubts nor have led him any closer to accepting his wife's passing. I also don't think I have helped him believe in either God's love or His mercy."</p><p>"Is that what has been troubling you?"</p><p>I shifted as I stood before her in my usual habit. It was still the one belonging to a novice sister and she could easily see my reluctance to answer. Perhaps if I had been wearing her full nun's attire, her body sucessfully hidden by the long black habit, I could have successfully disguised the action. Instead she witnessed my embarrassment and knew that there was something else wrong.</p><p>"Speak up, Sister Erin," she chastised. "There will be no secrets in my abbey."</p><p>I wanted to tell her of the afternoon spent in Lomax's office and the missing twenty minutes. The images of my defiled breasts reflected in the office's bathroom mirror flashed through my mind but they had been a mere mirage, I told myself. A few seconds later, any signs that they had been touched or fondled had disappeared and the following morning they had still remained as smooth, pale and unmarked as always. Mentioning the large amount of cream oozing from my vagina from seemingly excessive arousal, also seemed particularly humiliating. There were many things I did not feel comfortable discussing with the pious head of the abbey and <em>sex</em> was certainly at the top of the list.</p><p>Not feeling like lying to the Reverend Mother, though, I still could not find the strength to being completely honest either. I found myself instead hiding behind the other truth in shame. "Yes," I answered. "I fear failing both Kevin Lomax and my God."</p><p>She looked at me more kindly then and clasped her hands in front of her. "I assure you, Sister Erin, you will only fail Lomax if you do not give him what he came to us for."</p><p>I gazed up at her in question.</p><p>"Your comfort," she replied. "And, no matter what you might think, child, Kevin Lomax told me himself that you are reaching him and he knows you will <em>touch</em> him even more profoundly some day. Remember: 'there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth,' Sister Erin. That is why it is important for you to do <em>whatever</em> you can to help ease his suffering."</p><p>And though her eyes seemed as detatched as always, and her face the picture of calm serenity, I thought for the passing of a second a smile had claimed her thin, straight lips.</p><p>* * *</p><p>During the next few days, I fully realized that what was troubling me even more than the unnerving time lapse and hallucination was the fact that I had begun to care for Lomax in a way that was not wholly proper for my role as nun. I began to attribute this to my loss of minutes and the fact that my mind had conjured up an act of violation which had never taken place: I desired to be punished. The attraction had been present ever since I had seen the man in the cemetery, I knew. Though I had given myself to God, I still possessed eyes to see and Kevin Lomax was a person of rare beauty, surpassing even that of the stone angel guarding over his wife's grave. I was still a woman and found myself aroused by his handsome face and alluring body. But it was not only these that made me drawn to the man. I truly enjoyed the company of his soul. He was kind, funny, charming and intelligent. One of those on its own was compelling in its own fashion but all four together was unique and terribly disarming. In a way, he reminded me of all the boys I had been attracted to in school but could never bring myself to talk to. However, whenever I was with Kevin, he succeeded in breaking down a fragment of my wall of shyness and helped me to expose my true self to him.</p><p>
  <em>"It doesn't make sense to me...why God would want you to hide something so pretty..."</em>
</p><p>Attraction born of the eyes was understandable; attraction born of the heart seemed a far greater sin.</p><p>Everytime, I thought of telling the Reverend Mother this I remembered her words about heaven and sinners and thought too of Kevin having confided in her that my spiritual instruction was doing some good. Thinking of the man being lost within his doubt and confusion, alone now that both Mary Ann and his possible mistress had both left the world in horrible ways, ones which especially haunted him because he was there to see them, I wanted to help guide him towards heaven and not abandon him in his hell. To damn Kevin Lomax for my own soul's survival hardly seemed in keeping with the teachings of my beloved Nazarene, whom the Reverend Mother had quoted in order to give me the strength to hopefully conquer my fear of failing him.</p><p>"Please Father give me the will and Your courage," I was praying as I turned a corner one day and almost bumped into Sisters Johanne, Caroline and Sarah, all talking and laughing amongst themselves. "Sorry," I apologized.</p><p>"You should be mindful of where you're going," Johanne remarked, gazing down her long nose at me.</p><p>"I will from now on," I replied, both wounded by her sharp tone and angered by it as well.</p><p>"She was too busy thinking of her handsome lawyer," Caroline stated and I saw a cruel smile spread like a wave across the faces of my three fellow sisters. I suspected then the subject of their conversation and the reason for their laughter before we had, unfortunately, all crossed paths.</p><p>"Tell us Sister Erin," Sarah queried. "How far do you go in your <em>instruction</em> with Kevin Lomax?"</p><p>My mouth fell open in my shock, realizing her meaning.</p><p>"Does he ask you to open even wider than that?" she quickly added, leaning forward conspiratorially.</p><p>"It is disgusting," Johanne snapped in her self righteous way. "Letting you, the youngest one here, be around a man without supervision. I've told the Reverend Mother how awful it is but since he's donating so much..."</p><p>"Sister Erin," I heard a voice saying behind me and turned to find a Sister Beatrice hurrying towards us. She was a small woman with clear blue eyes and a serenely kind face. Beatrice was sweet and compassionate, the model of the nun I hoped to be one day and the person I liked best in all of the abbey. She lacked the Reverend Mother's harshness and kept judgements to herself, preferring to be only happy and helpful to all of the novices under her care. "I have a message the Reverend Mother wanted me to relay to you," she told me in her high and melodic tone, one which suited her place as head of the choir. "You are to go and see Kevin Lomax at the New York Supreme Court Building, outside of room 121b, this afternoon around three," the woman stated. "He has some free time and wishes to see you for further instruction."</p><p>Sisters Caroline, Johanne and Sarah tittered as they started to walk away, leaving me standing alone with Sister Beatrice. The sound of my fellow novice's conversation still managed to reach us after a few minutes and I felt embarrassed incase the older nun had caught any of the words that I had been able to hear quite clearly. If I had known that jealousy and ranks still existed within convent walls, I would not have been in such a hurry to take my vows, I contemplated sadly. I remembered Kevin's confused frustration over the fact that I had turned Catholic and my hope of becoming a full fledged nun and, for a moment, understood and shared it.</p><p>"Is that all right, Sister Erin?" Beatrice asked when I did not reply and I turned to find her suddenly fretting in that earnest way she did when she had feared she had made a mistake and hurt one of our feelings. "Can you go and see him?"</p><p>"It's fine," I calmed her, not experiencing the feeling I was hoping to give. My stomach suddenly felt filled with butterflies which made it excited and sick at the prospect of seeing Kevin again after our brief separation.</p><p>"Oh good," she said jovially and then turned to smile brightly at me. "I hope I can expect to see you at choir practice in the morning. Your voice has always been quite lovely but it has improved tremendously over the last few weeks, since you have joined us."</p><p>"Thank you," I stated and offered her a sincere and grateful smile. Choir was one of my few joys inside of the abbey. It brought with it a special closeness to God that the other sisters could not spoil when our voices joined in harmony every other morning.</p><p>"Well now, I'd best go tell the Reverend Mother so she can inform Mr. Lomax. He has been so kind to us; both he <em>and</em> Mr. Milton."</p><p>I watched as the little woman hurried off back to her superior before sighing deeply, grateful to be alone once more and granted the time to process the fact that I was to see Kevin after a reprieve of around two weeks. That the meeting was to take place in the Courthouse further took me away from my comfort until I realized that I would have been equally disturbed at the prospect of seeing him in the office.</p><p>My thoughts instantly went to the black leather couch and I was left feeling both frightened and aroused and unable to truly understand why.</p><p>* * *</p><p>The New York City Supreme Court Building was packed as I entered it but I managed to squeeze myself in past the group of reporters waiting outside of room 121b. The fact that I was a nun had a lot to do with that specific miracle, I understood. I felt like Moses must have when God parted the Red Sea for his group of anxious and impatient former slaves to safely walk through. I thought I could hear Kevin's accent speaking loud and clearly on the opposite side of the large doors, addressing Judge, jury or witness but I walked past it, deciding that I did not want to overhear a single word spoken. The less I knew of the case the better, I felt, and, besides, I was not there for the defendent but rather the man whom was doing his best to represent her. That bothered me just as much as anything: that Kevin Lomax might have been causing pain to the prosecuter's witnesses just to let a murderess go free, and I could not allow myself to listen to it for even a second</p><p>Seeing an empty bench far away from the crowd and on the opposite end of the room, I strode towards it, hoping to get as far out of earshot as possible and escape the mob's frenzied circus in order to wait quietly for the day's proceedings to be over. Luckily, Kevin's voice now became muffled and I was left with only the background noise from the other side of the corridor.</p><p>Across from my seat on the empty bench, a janitor was busily working on fixing the drinking fountain and I watched him occassionally, whenever his back was turned, so as not to make him self conscious. When a jet of water finally came spurting out I was happy for the man, whom had been getting increasingly annoyed with his own lack of success.</p><p>That joy was disturbed by the thought which immediately afterwards entered my head, however.</p><p>
  <em>"It looks like an ejaculating metal cock."</em>
</p><p>Suffering shame at the thought, I felt my cheeks burning and I looked away, staring at the pattern on the floor. My thoughts had usually been less than pure, but since the day I had been caught in the rain and had sat in Lomax's office in the red robe they had become increasingly carnal. Everything I saw could be suddenly turned sexual, and the idea of the fountain being a penis unleashing its seed embarrassed me and caused unwanted arousal, another event which was happening more and more. I felt my vagina clench a few times while my clit twitched and I squirmed on the bench in shame at what my body was doing without my will and luckily without anybody else realizing it.</p><p>A pair of coal black loafers appeared and stepped into place, aiming themselves in my direction.</p><p>Raising my eyes from off the courthouse's obviously recently polished floor, my eyes directly met those of John Milton. The head of the firm for which Lomax worked was staring at me with a self satisfied grin on his worn yet still handsome face. The drone from the courtroom, no longer Kevin's pleasing tone, stopped as did the buzzing from the men surrounding us in the hallway outside. Milton nodded his head in acknowledgement of me, an action I did not return, before turning to make his own way through the sea of journalists, his thousand dollar suit apparently having even more control over them than my nun's garb did.</p><p>Still plagued by intense guilt, an emotion closely associated with my faith, I was both terrified and relieved when the courtroom doors unexpectedly opened and sound returned with a blast to existence.</p><p>The reporters, already at the doors, went mad, asking questions about the trial to strangers and I instantly wished that their voices would be lost once more, hearing grisly questions about the murder Lomax's client might have committed. Apparently the murdered husband and mistress had been found naked and decapitated with their severed heads placed on the other's lap in imitation of oral sex. I saw Kevin's face suddenly appear and several microphones pushed into it, along with the expected string of accompanying questions. The attorney held his hand up, refusing to answer a single one of them. Turning in my direction to shoot down a particularly loud questioner from a tabloid worker, Kevin Lomax's eyes landed on me down the length of the corridor in between and moved no further.</p><p>Once more, the courthouse's lobby lost its voice as I stared into the dark eyes of the man. Though, this time, the silence was not unwelcome but comforting to a great degree. There were many emotions that coursed through my soul as I saw Kevin Lomax for the first time in days following my strange delusion. Fear was there along with even more shame and a strong feeling of confusion. To my surprise, however, the things which I felt most were fondness, joy and a peace which should not have existed in the company of every other apprehensive feeling I was currently experiencing. We smiled in unison then, actions helplessly committed in affection amidst the bedlam created by the reporters.</p><p>Kevin pushed past the crowd to get to me, leaving bafflement and offense in his wake. The realization that their quarry was rushing towards the silent, overweight nun, sitting by herself on the bench seemed to halt the journalists momentarily, giving the lawyer enough time to reach and grab me gently by the arm, pulling me to my feet. "Let's get the hell out of here," he suggested as the men and women behind us regained the ability to move their feet and chased the very odd couple of lawyer and nun out from the place which had once been referred to as a temple of justice. Once again, I thought of how we made quite the pair, he and I. Kevin's costly trenchcoat was open and flapping behind him as he ran like he was trying to beat the devil, holding the hand of the plump little nun that was me, my own cheap coat blowing behind my body while I managed to keep his pace only because I hated the thought of forsaking him.</p><p>Every face we passed bore the same shocked expression and I was fully aware of what everybody in the courthouse was thinking. The habit I adorned negated any chance of a romance between the hotshot widower lawyer and the mystery girl he was leaving with. No, everyone from the reporters to the janitor (the same one whom had been fixing the fountain) would have only one thought on their minds: Kevin Lomax was trying to soothe away his guilt and had turned to God to do it.</p><p>And after having heard the gory details of his client's case, I would have been lying if I said the thought had not crossed my mind too.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Okay, took a look at my fics and I decided that I want to finish this one up on Halloween, the day I had originally planned on publishing it as a one shot. Likewise, I hope to finish "Across the Fiery Desert and Under a Blood Red Moon" on Christmas Eve or Day. I think that "Just Another Runaway" might be complete after two more updates. Everything else, I'm not sure about...</p><p>We'll see how it plays out! ;D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Consolation for a Stone Angel</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Kevin Lomax takes me to the cemetery, after which I experience a strange dream.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>We continued to garner curious glances as we walked with slower pace down the New York City streets: the stunning man in a suit that matched his black, slicked hair and the penguin by his side, suprisingly swift and graceful despite her large size. The interest was free from the same stigma that had clouded it in the courthouse, assuming that they did not recognize Kevin Lomax. But their appraisal still contained the contrast between his obvious professional air and my evident religious appearance.</p><p>Perhaps what shocked them most, however, were the smiles on our faces and our occassional laughter. We were, afterall, both giddy from having escaped the throng of reporters back at the Supreme Court Building.</p><p>But it was something else besides, I understood.</p><p>We were both <em>happy</em> in each other's company.</p><p>Our conversation was lighthearted. We talked about things other than the reason Kevin had been at the courthouse: the looks on the reporters faces when we had evaded them, how I had gotten to the courthouse in the first place, the autumn chill in the air.</p><p>It was one of the first times I had seen the man free from his sorrows.</p><p>Our discussion did not touch on what had happened behind the closed doors of courtroom 121b until we reached the destination where Kevin had decided to take me so that we could talk in private and only be heard by dead ears:</p><p>The Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum.</p><p>While Kevin knelt on one knee by his wife's grave, offering her a bouquet of flowers he had purchased from a small floral shop along the way, I stood silently by his side. I preferred our having the day's counseling in the cemetery as opposed to the lawyer's office, which still made me both unnerved and aroused. The cemetery was peaceful and I fondly recalled the day I had first met the man there whom was currently similarly paying his quiet respects to the woman he had lost. If anything made me disquietened, it was the memory of the Devil's Paintbrush, a weed, which had inexclicably been in the bouquet the Reverend Mother had given me and the large stone angel which was guarding over Mary Ann Lomax's grave. After we had arrived, I could not find the courage to look at the statue nor the headstone. It was my guilt, I realized. I had been fostering fond feelings for the woman's husband ever since I had witnessed him grieving for her. They had only strengthened over the past few weeks until I had been left to hallucinate the effects of him violating me in order to deal with the shame of my attraction for him. I felt unwelcomed there by her grave, feeling that both the jealous Mary Ann's spirit would be looking down at me in anger while her guard would be prepared to make me pay for disturbing his ward during her rest. In fear, I avoided looking at the angel's face but kept my eyes on Kevin Lomax solely.</p><p>Though cemeteries were long thought of by people to be the dwelling places of ghosts, the only truly haunted thing about Trinity seemed to be the look in the lawyer's eyes as he stared at the inscription on Mary Ann's marker. He stared at it as if wishing by his gaze alone he could erase the date of her death and somehow resurrect her. At one point, I watched as he gave up the attempt and his vision suddenly became glazed, though his shoulders tensened more. "You're not going to ask me if she's guilty...my client?" Kevin suddenly asked unexpectedly. His eyes remained on the headstone and the still existent date of death, defeated. "Everybody I have ever known has asked me if the people I defend are guilty. It was the opposite when I was a prosecutor...they'd ask me if there wasn't a chance they were innocent then."</p><p>I stared at him just as he stared at the tombstone, with the longing of wanting that which you could never have.</p><p>"It's not my place," I replied with a shrug. "Knowing human beings...not everyone you defend can be innocent; not everybody you prosecuted could have been guilty."</p><p>"<em>Everyone</em> is guilty in one way or another," Kevin Lomax said bitterly still refusing to look at me.</p><p>My earlier suspicion that the lawyer had infact been involved with the woman his wife had murdered returned. His words only reinforced the belief and I knew that I should try to broach the subject to try to heal the man, dven if he ended up hating me for it and it wrecked the easy comfort between us.</p><p>"Were you involved with Christabella Andreoli?" I asked, maybe a little too bluntly from my fear.</p><p>This question was enough to earn Kevin's attention. His eyes met mine and I swallowed heavily. Though his expression was blank at the beginning of the locked gaze, the pensiveness of his features eventually softened and a sad smile soon crossed his face, helping my fear over having offended him to fade.</p><p>"No. There was a time I wanted to be but, no. Nothing happened. She was my half sister."</p><p>"Your half sister?" I repeated in bafflement. "How did you find out?"</p><p>"It doesn't matter," he said with a shrug. "Let's just say, dad told me he had children all over the <em>world</em>."</p><p>"Irresponsible asshole," I exclaimed and then placed a hand over my mouth quickly.</p><p>Kevin smiled in genuine amusement and fondness. "Why, Sister Erin, is that a bit of humanity slipping out from under your habit?"</p><p>"I'm sorry," I apologized. "It's not my place to judge."</p><p>"No need," he countered and then studied me somberly. "Can I say anything to you? Are we that far in these little sessions of ours?"</p><p>"Yes," I said, perhaps a little too hastily due to my earlier lapse.</p><p>Kevin Lomax gave a small nod and then turned back to stare at his wife's headstone.</p><p>"I miss Mary Ann lips wrapped around my cock," Kevin Lomax stated.</p><p>Standing in the cemetery, surrounded by graves, I blinked as I pictured the lips of a woman I had never seen wrapping around the cock that I wanted to view more than any other sight on God's earth.</p><p>"She used to do this little thing that always made me come. Some little trick with her tongue that would make my balls tighten and me shoot off inside of her mouth before I'd know it."</p><p>Mary Ann's lips were replaced with my own and in my mind I saw my own tongue licking Kevin Lomax's shaft, slowly tasting its underbelly before my lips closed around the red and angered tip of the phallus.</p><p>"I miss dipping my dick into the wet hole between her legs. Like it was being baptized in her cunt and washed clean by her cream."</p><p>I saw Kevin Lomax's swollen cock ready at my slit, his leaking tip already peeking in between enflamed folds, which were dripping wet themselves. The pleasure of arousal claimed me between my legs. My clit started its budding and my opening felt that delicious pressure up high that I always experienced when I had been turned on. I closed my eyes, half trying to fight it and half helplessly lost to it.</p><p>"I miss having <em>sex</em>," I heard Kevin Lomax confess.</p><p>"You can't find somebody?" I asked, not wholly aware of what I was saying, my voice sounding odd and husky from the heat I was feeling within.</p><p>"My father wants me to save it for someone important."</p><p>"Your father?" I asked in something which sounded like a moan while I felt my vagina clenching and spitting out its own baptismal fluid.</p><p>When I opened his eyes, I saw the lawyer turned towards me, looking at me intently and rising to his feet.</p><p>"Your father?" I repeated, shaking off my arousal by holding on to what I thought the man had just said. "What would your father have to do with...?"</p><p>"<em>Father</em>?" Kevin stated, coming to stand so close to my side that we were touching. "I didn't mention my father. I told you <em>I</em> was saving it for someone important. After what happened with Mary Ann and Christabella I think it's best I don't run head first into anything romantic or sexual. And you wouldn't suggest I go out and hire a prostitute now would you, Sister Erin? My own Mary Magdalene?"</p><p>He was too close, too intimate; I felt the nearness of his body and it was too soon following my arousal. I swiftly turned my head, averting my gaze from his, and as I did my eyes finally came to rest on the stone statue. The angel stood with its head lowered down, as if studying the two lowly humans standing below it and by the platform on which it stood. Its beautiful wings were lowered and to its side, modestly hidden. Each feather was perfectly captured as well as each fold in its robe. It was neither its dress nor its wings, however, that drew my gaze but its head. Though I had looked at it before, one fact about it had escaped my notice, just as the name inscribed on the headstone it protected had as well.</p><p>"It's of <em>you</em>," I whispered in shock, looking between the stone angel and Kevin Lomax.</p><p>"Is it?" Kevin asked, not looking above us but stepping even closer towards me, pushing my chubby body towards the angel's platform. "I don't think so."</p><p>I alternated my eyes between the attorney's angelic face and the statue's somehow satyr like face and saw clearly the similarity between them, though the breathing of the two would not admit it. The small yet mesmerizing eyes, the thin nose and full lips...they were identical.</p><p>Lips nearing mine, he continued to force me up against the stone angel itself. My head bumped against its groin but all I could do was moan as I felt the bulge behind the sculptured robe touch the back of my head. I felt dazed; my body too heavy too move.</p><p>Kevin's hand reached up to touch my cheek and I felt his fingers working at the edge of my whimple, trying desperately, possessively, to get at the curls hidden away from him beneath it.</p><p>"I...I have to get back to the Abbey," I said almost plaintitively. "I...I have choir practice in the morning.</p><p>Kevin's eyes were joined with mine in the Trinity Cemetery and I felt myself falling into them again, as surely as the leaf I saw out of the corner of my eye falling from the Maple in the background. The leaf was red, colored by the Devil's Paintbrush, and I watched it until it was on level with Kevin Lomax's dark eyes, becoming a third one of scarlet.</p><p>One second the leaf had only half completed its fall. The next, I shut my eyes and opened them to see it on the ground, having finished its journey apparently in the blinking of an eye.</p><p>My eyes turned once again to Lomax's face. There were tears in his haunted, dead eyes and his lips held that raw and used look once more.</p><p>"You do?" Kevin asked, seeming to swallow a sob. Removing his hand from my face, the best lawyer at Milton, Chadwicke and Waters turned and walked away. "We'd better get thee back to the nunnery then."</p><p>I brought a hand to my forehead, feeling a loose curl which had somehow managed to escape, afterall, while Kevin stood with his back towards me. My skin was feverish and when I brought my hand to my lips they felt hot and sore as well. Kevin's sob was catching it seemed and I quickly swallowed it so it would not burst out from my own throat and embarrass me.</p><p>"I bet you have a lovely singing voice, Erin," Kevin stated, once again denying me his gaze. "Maybe I'll come to Church to hear it someday."</p><p>Blinking my eyes, as if waking from another dream and losing the remembrance of it, I heard the Reverend Mother congratulating me on the progress I was making with the grieving widower and how I was to continue with it.</p><p>There being rejoicing in heaven over the gaining of his soul more than my own growing confusion and suffering.</p><p>I smiled innocently and foolishly focusing on how pleased she would be instead of the strange tingling of my lips and the distant, dull ache in my mind. "I'd like that," I replied truthfully.</p><p>"Sister," Kevin added after lowering his head, his sadness over his wife's passing evidently having found him again. "You know how we were running in the courthouse?"</p><p>"Yes?"</p><p>"I think we should have kept running," he said, his voice lost and still broken.</p><p>I started to walk to him but Kevin Lomax walked away from me, his shoulders heavy with a weight I suddenly knew I had not lightened but had rather only added to.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Kevin paid for my taxi back to the Abbey but he seemed as far and distant from me as the stone angel in the cemetary.</p><p>Perhaps that was what influenced my dream that night, I reasoned to myself in desperation the next morning.</p><p>Lost in that realm of sleep, which brought with it a land close to reality but with its own strange logic and lack thereof, I walked through the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mauseleum in bare feet. The place was cast in the darkness of night, a solitary moon above the sky, not full but like the thumbnail of the God I had spent my life loving and trying to find on the earth it shone above, only ever seeming to find Him in whispers without full conversations, lest my doubt be fully removed. The ground felt real beneath my feet as did the sounds of disrupted twigs of the sleeping place hosting the dead.</p><p>I walked to Mary Ann Lomax's grave, the breeze cold on my face and almost real. Coming to the headstone, I realized in familiar guilt that it had not been the woman I had come for at all; it had been the angel of her husband which had drawn me to the cemetery. Walking to the unfeeling piece of stone, I hugged his robed legs, my cheek resting against the lump underneath which suddenly seemed to beat against my flesh even through the thick stone of its garb. It was pounding like a drum and I felt heated, wetness falling out between my legs, wanting to cleanse it. Swallowing I raised my head and saw the angel watching me with an unknowable look on his perfect face of gray. God's nail was above his head, glowing and looking like half of the creature's missing halo.</p><p>My hand went to the erection by my face and felt it pulsating against my palm.</p><p>"It is important for you to do <em>whatever</em> you can to help ease his suffering," I heard the Reverend Mother encouraging me and it sounded as if she were standing right behind me.</p><p>I stroked the phallus hidden from my eyesight a few times in hunger and when I raised my vision towards the angel's face, I saw that his eyes had become closed in his pleasure.</p><p>Encouraged that I was easing his suffering, my hands went to the edge of his stony robe and gripped it. I was only a little surprised when the hard stone surrendered to my action, lifting heavenward to reveal the statue of Kevin Lomax's fully erect penis and the sack so perfectly carved beneath it as well. They were all lovely, each vein raised in the length perfectly made, the glans smooth and its slitted tip beckoning for me to rest my tongue inside of it.</p><p>"I will praise Him; for you are fearfully and wonderfully made," I whispered and kissed the perfect manhood by my adoring face.</p><p>"Yes, Sister," I heard a man say and turned my head to find John Milton standing behind me, grinning in his horrible way. "But who made your Kevin Lomax? The million dollar question right there..."</p><p>I shook my head, embracing the statue's legs protectively.</p><p>Milton only continued his malicious smile and teasing. "'Did He smile His work to see?'" the man quoted. "'Did He Who made the lamb make thee?'"</p><p>Tears flooding my eyes, I looked back up to my angel's face and saw my tears mimicked, one sliding down one gray cheek and falling down and on to the stone cock below.</p><p>"Kind of looks like Florida, doesn't it?" I heard Milton ask.</p><p>My tongue peeked out from my mouth before I knew it, tasting the tear which was made of cement and not of salt or water. I licked the stone penis, its texture rough against my tongue, which dipped into the hole at its tip like it had longed to do. My lips would not stop there, however, they encircled the large piece of smooth wonderful art.</p><p>"Open wider," Milton laughed behind me but I had forgotten him, focused on bringing my angel his peace.</p><p>Slowly I suckled the stone phallus, my hand working its length and balls, wanting to call out the seed filling the large testicles which had been building for too long without release. The angel's cock danced within my grip and mouth. Once I glanced upwards to see the stone Kevin Lomax staring at me in frozen carnal bliss as I sucked on his willing penis. My action, his reaction was bringing me my own pleasure, my vagina wishing that the stone erection was buried inside of it instead. It was my mouth which had that honor, though, and I stood in the darkened Trinity Cemetery giving the statue of the angel head, as if I had declared myself his personal Mady Magdalene, offering him healing in the most sexual of ways, for in the act, and in his penis, I heard my God still whispering to me.</p><p>Before the Kevin Lomax angel came, I felt the balls lift and tighten and the penis begin to spasm madly. As the ejaculation came, I looked up to see that the angel's head had been thrown back in ecstasy, his mouth open. Expecting semen, I was shocked as more fresh, wet cement was poured down my throat but I kept my mouth around the stony faucet, swallowing the fluid dutifully and with delight.</p><p>After the final spilling had occurred, I backed away by an inch, the spent cock before me, clutching my stomach which now felt too heavy. Crying, I gazed up at the stone angel to see him staring down at me in want, his lust for me unsatisfied.</p><p>In the quiet cemetery, the Lomax angel opened his wings at last, creating a blast of almost deafening sound while he vainly presented their beauty to me. I studied them in awe, as the leaves they had blown in their movement fell down around us, settling to new places on the cemetery ground. The tips of his wings were blades and with one sharp edge it sliced the nun's habit, and all beneath it, in one assured action. My shields of cloth fell off from my shoulders and body, leaving me standing there naked, cold and trembling before him. The hair consisting of corkscrew curls, which had earned his praise, blowing in the chilled wind while curls far lower were also on bold display.</p><p>Bringing the wing's knife to his robe, the angel cut off the robe from his own body and we faced each other naked and unashamed amongst the dead.</p><p>Kevin Lomax held out his arms to me and I ran into them willingly, climbing the platform I now saw was an altar. My arms around his shoulders, the angel wrapped me in his elegant wings of stone while he held me tightly to him.</p><p>I looked one last time into his handsome face, wanting to tell him that my stomach felt far too heavy, but staring into his stone countenance I saw sorrow and the fact written that he already knew. Holding on to me possessively, the ground around us began to quake and I saw over my angel's shoulder the ground open up behind us. Fire was in the opening chasm and all of the damned whom had not found their final rest within the Trinity cemetery. They cried and pleaded for mercy, weeping for forgiveness but it was too late. Looking at their faces, I could not tell if Mary Ann was amongst them, never having seen her face before.</p><p>A pain like labor struck my belly and I returned my gaze back to Kevin, whom kissed me passionately as he fell backwards willingly off from his altar and into the hell below, refusing to use his wings to save us, the weight in my womb only aiding in our fall from grace.</p><p>Screaming I woke and found myself in the saftey of my bed at the Abbey for the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. In gratitude and resentment, I sat alone in my bed, rocking back and forth, nobody coming to see why I had cried out, and adding more quieter weeping to the noises that they chose to ignore.</p><p>* * *</p><p>It was hard to shake myself free of the disturbance the nightmare had left me with. I had not been able to fall back asleep and my eyes were sore and tired when I went to Choir practice in the morning, following a breakfast of plain porridge. Once again, nobody took much notice of me besides a kind smile from Sister Beatrice and some not so benevolent ones from the other novice sisters.</p><p>Taking my place in the back row, in the most unnoticeable of places, I felt my disquiet and fear begin to fade as we started to sing the hymns devoted to the God I then believed we were all in unison in our love for, despite the petty jealousies and resentments which seemed to exist between us.</p><p>"Now we'll practice 'Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing' for this upcoming Sunday," Sister Beatrice announced happily, obviously well pleased in our voices this morning.</p><p>At her choice, I fought a shiver, recalling the broken fountain returning to life and the angel's penis shooting off cement like a fountain inside of my mouth and down my throat.</p><p>
  <em>"Come, Thou Fount of every blessing</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Tune my heart to sing Thy grace</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Streams of mercy, never ceasing</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Call for songs of loudest praise</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Teach me some melodious sonnet..."</em>
</p><p>An uncomfortable pain seized my stomach and my voice faltered.</p><p>
  <em>"Sung by flaming tongues above..."</em>
</p><p>An image of my tongue exploring a phallus made of stone.</p><p>
  <em>"Praise the mount, I'm fixed upon it</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Mount of Thy redeeming love..."</em>
</p><p>The weight in my stomach returned and the next few notes exited my throat roughly, earning the irritated gazes of those surrounding me. When they only worsened, the sour looks only intensified, all except for Sister Beatrice whom looked at me in concern.</p><p>
  <em>"Here I raise my Ebenezer</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Here there by Thy great help I've come</em>
  <br/>
  <em>And I hope, by Thy good pleasure</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Safely to arrive at home</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Jesus sought me when a stranger</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Wandering from the fold of God</em>
  <br/>
  <em>He, to rescue me from danger</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Interposed His precious blood</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Oh, that day when freed from sinning</em>
  <br/>
  <em>I shall see Thy lovely face</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Clothed then in the blood washed linen</em>
  <br/>
  <em>How I'll sing Thy wondrous grace</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Come, my Lord, no longer tarry</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Take my ransomed soul away</em>
  <br/>
  <em>Send Thine angels now to carry..."</em>
</p><p>Violently I began to cough, wrecking the song entirely as the pain in my tummy grew.</p><p>"Sister Erin, are you all right?" the choir master stopped the piano and asked but I could not answer her.</p><p>Retching, something in my stomach turning over, I broke past the other sisters, running towards the washroom.</p><p>Once again nobody followed me in my pain, I slid on the floors in my desperate attempt to make it to the washroom before I threw up the morning's meal on the shining and freshly waxed floors. Bursting into the washroom, I thanked my Lord that it was vacant, grateful that nobody was there to witness my sickness. Throwing open a stall door, I knelt before the toilet, gagging as the pain in my gut worked its way slowly up. When it reached my throat, my eyes widened to their limit, tears flooding them in pain. Whatever was coming up was burning in vile but felt too large and sharp too. Retching forcefully, I saw my vomit fall into the toilet with a splash, partly red.</p><p>Only, once expelled, I saw that it was not vomit at all.</p><p>In horror, I peered down into the clean, white bowl of porcelain and saw lying at its bottom, surrounded by the blood it had brought with it in its birth, a small stone statue of a cherubic imp staring up at me and smiling wickedly as it sucked it's own phallic tail.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Robert Robinson wrote "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing."</p><p>William Blake wrote "The Tyger."</p><p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>I wanted to do a nice note for you here but it's getting late.</p><p>All I have the strength and attention left to type is that I just saw Hitchcock's "Notorious" for the first time on Friday. I thought it was incredibly romantic. And seeing Cary Grant's character on that park bench reminded me of you. He was left handed too. Can I be your Ingrid Bergman and keep you company? At least, until something better comes along?</p><p>I also watched "Suspicion" tonight with no audio but with subs...trying to decide which sense I'd give up if forced to I can never really decide. Taste and touch are now off the list because I wish I could do both to you.</p><p>Yeah. It's late enough for me to confess that openly.</p><p>Good night or good morning, Keanu.</p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. The Devil's Only Love</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Going to Kevin Lomax's office, I share an uncomfortable encounter with the man's boss.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>There's an ode to one of my favorite spiritual novels, Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair," in here methinks.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The little stone imp stared up at me from its resting place at the bottom of the toilet, wisps of blood floating around its elegant wings like scarlet clouds. My mouth hung open in shock and I felt a last drop of blood fall from my lip and hit the water like one solitary red raindrop or tear. The creature had been perfectly carved, gothic in style and now partially painted with the blood it had earned from me in its birth. Feeling my torn inner throat and the warm fluid falling down it, I remembered the statue Kevin Lomax's cement seed trailing down my throat and to my stomach. I pictured the creature being formed inside of the substitute womb, the acid becoming its own amniotic fluid.</p><p>A sudden wave of sickness claiming me, I gagged and this time did find my morning's breakfast coming up partially, the acid it was mingled with searing the fresh tears along its violent way.</p><p>I heard the door opening behind me and footsteps, one, two, as someone entered the washroom.</p><p>"Sister Erin, are you all right?" the kind, concerned voice of Sister Beatrice asked as she stood by the door.</p><p>Gazing at the devil, suffering pain and confusion, I knew that I was far from being all right. "Yes, my stomach just turned," I lied and heard Kevin Lomax saying,<em> "Make one sin, let him in."</em></p><p>"Oh dear me," she fretted. "I hope it's not that flu going around. Sister Anges just had it. Should you visit the Doctor's?"</p><p>"That...that might me a good idea," I replied, each garbled syllable causing me agony as it exited my lips.</p><p>"Shall I have the Reverend Mother's secretary make an appointment?"</p><p>"Yes," I said, slowly nodding my head, my eyes remaining on the imp, whom continued to fellate his own tail, forever condemned to do so in his malicious and stony state.</p><p>"Oh dear, oh dear, yes," Beatrice stated as she bustled out of the washroom, leaving me alone.</p><p>Almost.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Back in my room, permitted to forego the days chores and responsibilities due to my illness and the potential threat of infecting the other sisters, I placed the little imp in the drawer of my small dresser, far back in the right hand corner. I had wrapped it in a sock first, seeing it grinning at me lasciviously before white cotton ended its frozen yet cruel gaze. After fishing it out from the toilet, I had washed it in the sink, cleaning my blood and vomit from off of its small body. While I had been doing so, I marveled at the precision of its craftmanship and had felt a shudder overwhelm me when I had realized its face was familiar. Part of it was Kevin Lomax's own fine features while the others belonged to someone I could not quite place.</p><p>Leaving the statue in his place in the drawer, I fell onto my bed and brought a shaking hand to my forehead. The skin there was hot and yet I felt so terribly <em>cold</em>. Wrapping my arms around my waist I began to rock myself back and forth.</p><p>"Sister Erin," I heard the Reverend Mother's voice accompanying a knock on the door. "May I come in?"</p><p>My eyes darted quickly to the dresser, fearing that if the older woman was to enter the imp would suddenly come to life, escape its sock cage and fly around the room, all the while tattletelling the Reverend Mother of the dirty dream I had experienced the night before, one which seemed to have caused the tiny statue to be born. Still to deny her entrance would be to invite suspicion.</p><p>"Yes," I replied, ceasing my rocking and trying to appear relatively normal.</p><p>The Reverend Mother glided in and her eyes instantly rested on me sitting on the bed. "Sister Beatrice tells me that you are unwell," she remarked, looking down dourly at me.</p><p>"I was sick during choir practice," I answered, my voice still sounding very strange.</p><p>"I see," she commented. "I had my secretary make an appointment for you to see the Doctor. However, I just received word from Kevin Lomax that he wishes to see you this evening as well."</p><p>"When are they both for?" I asked.</p><p>"The same time," she replied. "Three thirty."</p><p>I lowered my head and exhaled sharply.</p><p>"It seems like you have a decision to make," the woman said sternly. "But I must recommend that if you are ill that, for your sake along with the others, you give your health precedence and delay your meeting with Lomax until later."</p><p>My hand instinctively went to my throat. Part of me knew that I should keep the appointment with the Doctor. I was feeling strange and still possessed the fear that something was horribly wrong. Although it seemed more like a potential mental problem, I knew I should see a physician to make sure that the lapses in time I was experiencing had nothing to do with a physical problem. I could not dare bring the statue of the demon to the Doctor but I should make sure that nothing had been left inside my stomach and ensure that the lacerations in my throat had not become infected by my vomit.</p><p>However, even stronger was the urge to see Kevin Lomax. Every part of my body, and more so my soul, felt compelled to rush to him. Perhaps, it was the primal urge to seek comfort with a man: that of a woman and her lover. But I was not meant to have one, having sworn off any man save for my Creator months ago. I knew I should be running to Him for my solace alone, not the person whom had started a frightful and longing sense of disquiet inside of my mind and heart. It was not God's arms I wanted around me, though, but Kevin Lomax's, I realized and almost cried.</p><p>Trying to deny the urge, I held myself instead and prayed for guidance.</p><p>"<em>Well</em>, Sister Erin," the Reverend Mother stated in impatient reproach. "Three thirty will be long past if you take any longer to make your decision."</p><p>I looked inside of my heart, praying to God still and heard only three words whispered to me while I saw in clear memory Lomax mourning by his wife's grave.</p><p>
  <em>"Go to him."</em>
</p><p>"I think I am feeling better now...it probably wasn't the flu or laryngitis or anything like that. Just a bit of stomach trouble," I replied, staring into her cold eyes. "Please tell Mr. Lomax that I'll see him this afternoon. Did he say where?"</p><p>She looked at me in suspicion but only answered, "His office at Milton, Chadwick and Waters."</p><p>Thinking of the black leather couch, I nodded. "That will be fine," I commented my voice becoming even more hoarse.</p><p>The senior nun studied me closely. "Your voice sounds strange. If it <em>isn't</em> laryngitis, are you sure you haven't been eating something you shouldn't have been? Something <em>besides</em> porridge?"</p><p>It was my morning to suffer memories it seemed. I recalled the stone penis inside of my mouth, the feeling of its polished smoothness on my lips as my tongue carressed and suckled the stiff object. Heat flared in my lap while a powerful thought consumed my mind:</p><p>
  <em>"What would the real one taste of? What would it feel like slipping down my throat and feeding me Kevin's warm cum?"</em>
</p><p>Instead, I only looked to the nun and gave myself one more sin to regret during my next confession by simply shaking my head in denial.</p><p>* * *</p><p>When I arrived at Milton, Chadwick and Waters, the attorney had not returned and his secretary showed me in to his professional sanctum, stating that her boss had given instructions to let me wait in his office instead of the company waiting room. I was unnerved by the thought of being left alone with the couch and the vague feeling of distress and arousal it left me with. However, associating the room closely with Kevin, I felt safer there then anywhere else in the building. I could not pinpoint it exactly but I was always left feeling that the other employees at the firm were laughing at me. I could detect smirks on their faces and hear muted snickers whenever I passed them in the corridors. For all its morbidity, I preferred meeting with Lomax at Trinity Cemetery and welcomed the fact that he had been kind enough to let me wait in the comfort and seculsion of his work space even if it left me uncomfortable.</p><p>How was he to know about my hallucinations, I reasoned.</p><p>As the secretary closed the door, her eyes met mine and I saw the same cruel amusement in them along with the familiar contemptuous grin. When the door was shut, I heard a small clicking sound which made me feel even more unnerved. Rushing to the door, I turned its recently polished knob and found it would not turn. Backing away, I saw myself reflected in its golden surface: a very young looking woman in a nun's habit was wearing a look of terror on her face. When my reflection suddenly winked at me and grinned in knowing malignancy, my hand flew to my mouth and I stifled a scream.</p><p>Although the sound had not successfully escaped, it still had managed to hurt my throat, which began to throb. My hand went and clutched the whimple surrounding it while my head felt dizzy and the room began to spin before me. Stumbling, I walked to the closest thing for balance and found my hand grasping the armrest of the leather couch. Staring down at its shining black surface I instantly saw myself lying on it, my breasts exposed while Kevin Lomax lay over me feasting on them. His dark head roamed across my breasts, so pale in contrast against the deep pitch black of the couch other than where he had bit me and my erect and sore nipples. My clit bloomed and began to throb in unison with my throat as I watched Kevin biting and kissing my smooth flesh. When he began to suck on my left nipple, my arousal deepened and I moaned helplessly. I felt his lips around my teat, teasing and sucking on it. In shock, I watched as Kevin suddenly lifted his head and met my eyes, his sensuous lips still surrounding my teat.</p><p>"Sister Erin?" a voice said, making me jump in the air and causing my vision to leave the image of my imagined violation.</p><p>My eyes found John Milton standing at the other end of the leather couch, a couch which was now empty, devoid of the hallucination of Kevin Lomax and myself.</p><p>"How did you get in?" I asked, my voice sounding cracked and horrible. "The door is locked."</p><p>"I was just using Kevin's washroom," Milton explained. "The executive one is broken and so is mine. You say that you're locked in here?"</p><p>I watched as the man furrowed his brow in consternation and headed for the door. When it refused to yield for him as well and several knocks did not bring the secretary, the man turned to look at me with a bemused grin on his worn face. "What do you know? Guess she accidentally locked us in here together and then went to the Xerox machine," John Milton said.</p><p>My hands tightened around the armrest and Milton continued to stare at me strangely. His hand went to his left pants pocket and I saw the shape of something inside of it before his hands clenched whatever it was.</p><p>Not enjoying the silence I spoke and found myself hating the way my voice sounded so damaged and raw even more. "Kevin told me to wait for him here."</p><p>"Something wrong with your throat?" John Milton inquired.</p><p>"Yes. I think it became cut from the inside."</p><p>While someone else might have asked me <em>how</em>, Milton just continued to stare at me, his hand working whatever was inside of his pocket. "You really should have gone and gotten it checked instead of coming here," he said.</p><p>I could not reply but remained as still as the stone statue I had vomited up.</p><p>"Kevin would have understood. He cares for you a great deal, Sister Erin."</p><p>We stared at each other across the room and I felt both warmed by his words and terrified somehow.</p><p>Offering me another self satisfied smile, John Milton strode towards Kevin Lomax's desk. "Let me get you some alcohol for it, at least. It will burn like hell but it will disinfect it." He opened the bottom drawer and took out a bottle of what looked like whiskey and two shot glasses.</p><p>"That's not necessary," I protested.</p><p>"Come now," he said, pouring the liquid into both glasses without spilling a drop even though his eyes never left mine.</p><p>"I really shouldn't."</p><p>"But you <em>can</em>, can't you?" Milton stated. "That's the thing...that's how humans get back at the God who made them for leaving, isn't it? They take a drink of something; sometimes they sleep with their neighbor's husband. Or maybe they kill their husband and his mistress and place their pretty little heads in each other's naked laps..."</p><p>John Milton was still staring at me while he took a drink and it was almost as if the alcohol was falling down my own throat and scalding it all the way down.</p><p>"It's the way a bunch of angry <em>children</em> tell their Father to fuck the hell off," he added.</p><p>I did not so much as blink nor did I walk to the full glass he slowly pushed towards me. "If you're trying to shock me with your choice of words, you should know I heard worse from my father on a daily basis when I was younger," I told him flatly.</p><p>"Oh, I know...before he left you," Milton stated. "You remember your first one too, right? Late night, outside of daddy's room...you knocked over the vacuum cleaner and said '<em>shit</em>' before you knew it. Your father overheard you and began to tease like he always did. Then you went into the bathroom and cried because you were afraid you had offended God."</p><p>The man said it like he had been there and tasted every single tear and my blood ran cold. I walked forward in shock. "How did you know that?" I whispered. "Do you know my father?"</p><p>He raised his glass as if in a toast. "I know <em>everybody's</em> father."</p><p>Swallowing, I felt fear and some other emotion quite the opposite rising within me: Defiance.</p><p>"You're wrong, Mr. Milton...Man rejected God even when He was still by our side and we had everything," I replied calmly. "Man has been telling God that we don't need him since the first sin in Eden. We just keep forgetting and <em>think</em> it's for the first time. History endlessly repeats. That's Mankind's downfall."</p><p>John Milton raised his glass again. "Here's to good old-fashioned ignorance then."</p><p>The head of the firm took a drink and then placed it down on the table, empty, beside the full glass. He walked forwards and stood two feet in front of me as I tried to retain my boldness. "So how's the <em>counseling</em> going with Kevin?" he asked smiling with a stone imp's familiar grin.</p><p>"Fine," I replied, my voice trembling slightly against my will.</p><p>"Maybe when it's all over you can <em>counsel</em> me too," he said with a wink and brushed the side of my face with the back of his hand.</p><p>I recoiled from the touch. Suddenly I became aware of the cursed black leather couch by our side. I saw Milton attacking me on it instead of Kevin and knew that if he were to there would be no part of me that desired it and I would go crazy...stark raving <em>insane</em>. Tears were filling my eyes and I was about to say "Stop," when someone else virtually said it for me.</p><p>"JOHN!" I heard Kevin Lomax exclaim in a raised and irritated tone.</p><p>Both Milton and I turned to find the young lawyer standing in the doorway, a look of contained rage on his face. I wanted to run to him and place my head against his chest, cleansing it of John Milton's horrible touch. Knowing that I would fall, my legs too unsure if I tried to, however, I stood where I was, praying that Kevin Lomax would protect me even with the distance between us.</p><p>"Hello Kevin," John Milton said jovially. "Sister Erin and I were just discussing how it's going with your spiritual guidance. I was suggesting that maybe when you're done she could help me out too."</p><p>Lomax was walking towards us and he casually came to stand between his employer and myself. "We've got a long way to go yet," he replied.</p><p>The younger and older man stood looking at one another in silence and I found myself placing a hand on Lomax's shoulder. He turned to look at me and I offered a small nod to show that I was okay.</p><p>"How'd the trial go today?" Milton shifted conversation like some drivers change lanes in traffic.</p><p>"Okay. I'm one witness away from an acquittal."</p><p>John smiled brightly. "That's my boy! That's great. But what else did I expect from the firm's favorite son?"</p><p>Milton thankfully began to walk towards the door and relief surged through me. As his hand rested on the knob, however, he turned and looked at his most promising new attorney. "You can't keep her all to yourself, Kevin. You <em>know</em> that, right?"</p><p>Milton's hand squeezed what was in his pocket again and as he left I thought I saw a tiny stone wing sticking out from the edge.</p><p>Following his departure, Kevin turned to look at me in almost disturbed shame. "I'm sorry if he bothered you, Erin."</p><p>"I don't understand. Why does <em>he</em> need counseling? Did he lose somebody too?" I asked in confused curiosity.</p><p>Lomax smirked, placing his attache case on the floor. "Not likely. Nobody he loved anyway. I doubt John Milton has ever loved anybody but himself during his entire existence."</p><p>Experiencing another wave of dizziness, my less than pleasant conversation with Milton catching up to me, Kevin saw me stagger and caught me around the waist to steady me. Gently he sat me down on the couch. "I feel like a prostitute," I confessed, his arm remaining around me. "The Reverend Mother offering me to this person and that for a donation."</p><p>"Do you want to stop our meetings?" the widower asked and I quickly met his eyes.</p><p>"No," I answered.</p><p>Kevin smiled with equal parts happiness, grief and compassion. "What happened to your voice?" he asked in concern.</p><p>"I don't know," I said in sorrow. I could not tell him about the dream of having given him head in the Trinity Cemetery while he had been an angel statue. Nor could I say that I had been wounded by coughing up a stone devil. In desperation, I held on to Kevin Lomax suddenly, wrapping my arms around him and holding him tightly to receive the peace I had lost and now sought.</p><p>Almost instantly, the man's own much stronger arms found me and we sat holding one another on the couch. In Kevin's arms I saw the error in my thinking in my room back in the Abbey. Running to the man was not running <em>away</em> from my Lord but <em>to</em> Him instead. Maybe God, possessing no arms to hold His children in a world belonging to His enemy, had given man the ability to do it for Him. Only we rarely ever did. Instead we chose to hurt and kill each other with the arms meant to console.</p><p>Unless we were lucky and found ourselves someone whom would.</p><p>Accepting my love for Kevin Lomax then, even if I had trapped myself by taking vows that I could only ever love him as my brother, I rested my head on his strong shoulder. "John Milton had to love <em>somebody</em> once. They say even the devil once loved God," I mused in sudden sympathetic compassion, feeling Kevin's body warm against mine.</p><p>Kevin Lomax held me tighter and whispered in solemn surprise, "Then maybe he did lose somebody, after all."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>Yay! I've been watching the backers for the BRZRKR graphic novels increase steadily today. Congratulations! I'm really curious about the two final stretch goals. I won't get anything because I backed without a reward but I'm still excited! </p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Answering the Call</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>I return to the Abbey to find something which further shatters my belief on my sanity. After another session with Kevin, I find my sense of reality further slipping away while the night brings a strange phone call...</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Almost didn't get this posted! Not sure about my update schedule this week. I'm having bloodwork done.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Returning to the Abbey of the Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, riding in a taxi Kevin had insisted paying for, I suffered a growing horror. I pictured my drawer with the sock containing the stone imp and hated the thought of going to sleep with it only a few feet away from me. My mind was filled with visions of it crawling free of its hiding place and coming to me while I slept, crawling back down to the stomach it had been vomitted up from only that morning. Only in my imagining, I saw it unfurling its sharp wings while halfway down my thoat. I saw and almost felt the wings tearing me from the inside out and the blood flowing out from my neck like I was a fleshly fountain of furiously spilling crimson water...</p><p>"We're here Sister," I heard the cab driver say, startling me from my gruesome vision.</p><p>"Thank you," I said grabbing my throat and almost feeling it throbbing underneath my fingers.</p><p>* * *</p><p>I met the Reverend Mother walking with Sister Johanne down the Abbey's corridor. They were whispering with each other and smiling about something but all I caught were the words "instruction" and "last night." The Reverend Mother gave the nun special teachings in the late evening every Wednesday night. It was a well known fact and most of my fellow novices believed that she was priming Johanne, so very much like her in temperment, to be her replacement. Now, stumbling upon them unaware, I could see a certain relaxation and intimacy which neither usually showed to the others. Usually it was opposites which attracted but I knew that for people like the Reverend Mother and her pupil they would always reserve their favor to those whom reflected their own image back at them.</p><p>Seeing me, their manner readorned their usual cold primness and they suddenly appeared like two lifesize bookends standing stiffly with no books between them. "Sister Erin," the Reverend Mother greeted coldly. "And how was Kevin Lomax today?"</p><p>"Fine," I replied. "His case is almost over and he expects an acquittal."</p><p>"Good," she replied with the glimmer of a smile.</p><p>I was not quite sure that I shared the sentiment. The woman Kevin was defending was guilty. Even though I had not researched the case more than the fragments of conversations I had overheard in the Courthouse and that brief insinuation from John Milton, I remembered the latter's remark and knew that she was a murderer nonetheless. I could see no good being served by her freedom. Getting away with murder once, she would be set loose on the world to harm others again.</p><p>"And how is your <em>illness</em>?" Johanne asked and I knew that she did not truly care from the snideness in her tone.</p><p>"The same," I stated.</p><p>"Maybe you should have chosen to see the Doctor instead," the Reverend Mother chastised.</p><p>"Yes, Reverend Mother," I replied.</p><p>Lowering my head, the two nun's passed by me, one on either side, making me their downcast covered book for a brief moment.</p><p>"She only did it for attention," I heard the younger nun whispering but was grateful I had hurried out of earshot before hearing the elder's reply.</p><p>Rushing into my austere room, I walked to the plain dresser first and reached at its back for the sock. Though the imp caused only terror in my soul, I longed to see it again, if only to prove to myself its existence and that it was still only a statue and unable to hurt me. The more I grasped, however, and the more all my fingers fell upon were things soft and not hard, the more my panic grew. Crying out loud lowly, I pulled the drawer farther out only for its contents to fall all over the floor. Underwear, socks and bras lay scattered everywhere but as I got to my knees and searched through them, I did not find the devil.</p><p>Frantically, I checked the other drawers but could not find it. Tears were falling down my cheeks as the rest of the room was desperately searched. The imp remained absent, however, and I held myself shaking.</p><p>"It was real...it <em>was</em> real," I repeated, my hand going to my throat to touch it, proving the imp's birth by the wound it had left me with. Swallowing, though, I found it no longer hurt and felt perfectly normal. Sister Beatrice could have asked me to perform a Sunday morning solo and I could have consented, I understood, with another loud swallow.</p><p>
  <em>"She only did it for attention..."</em>
</p><p>"No...no...no," I began to weep and rock back and forth more violently.</p><p>Flashing through my mind suddenly came the memory of a stone wing protruding from John Milton's pocket. It had looked exactly like the tip of my missing statue's own one, I knew, and this was what I focused on as voices of doubt, all sounding as cold and judgemental as Sister Johanne, sung in their own chorus inside of my head that I was slowly but surely losing my mind.</p><p>* * *</p><p>"She was acquitted, after all," Kevin Lomax stated, staring out the window again at the city he had opened the door for his client to roam once more. "Another win on my <em>second</em> streak."</p><p>"You sound like you just lost," I said.</p><p>"I did," he said to turn and look over his shoulder at me. "Another piece of my soul...one by one breaking off and flying away."</p><p>I pictured Lomax's soul like some glowing small stone angel (not imp) going away from him and shook my head, feeling sorrow for the lawyer. I could not stand the thought of him being damned.</p><p>"I knew she was guilty. I knew that she didn't grieve or feel regret so that she'd likely just go out and do it again. Yet I convinced twelve men and women that she was innocent...All I want to know is...who the hell do they think did it anyway? I mean, fuck! Did not one of them ever ask who else would kill a man and mistress and place their fucking bodies in such a damn explicit pose?"</p><p>He looked around suddenly guiltily at me, realizing his profanity and remembering my vocation.</p><p>"Sorry," he apologized. "I shouldn't have..."</p><p>I shook my head. "It's all right. If you were Catholic I'd just tell you to come to confession. Being protestant I recommend just asking God for His forgiveness in a prayer."</p><p>"What good is asking for forgiveness if you know you'll just do it again? Why should He bother forgiving any of us when we are bound to commit the same sins over and over again?" he asked in irritation both at himself and God.</p><p>I ran to him instantly again, grateful to leave the black leather I was sitting on.</p><p>"You show your repentence, Kevin," I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. "You and God <em>know</em> it's there. It's your promise to try and your attempts, even if you are not always successful, which matter."</p><p>"God would forgive me then?" Kevin asked.</p><p>I nodded and took his left hand. The touch reverberated throughout his body as I felt the strange heat of his wedding band. I saw it ripple like a single drop of rain on the surface of a smooth lake, making the stillwater that he was tremble for a moment. It took hold of me too, as it always did when we touched. If there were moments in my life where I felt God in my soul then touching Kevin Lomax always made me feel as if I were touching Him too. The attorney's eyes went to my hand clasping his and then up the length of my arm and to my face where our eyes once again locked.</p><p>"And what if I were to do something horrible to you, Sister Erin?" he asked. "Would you forgive me too?"</p><p>My mouth opend to reply until a glare caught my attention out the window. I watched as the sun reflected off the shining chrome of a limousine down on the street in front of Milton, Chadwick and Waters. It was unlike any other limo I had ever seen before, colored in the shades of red, orange and black of my Devil's Paintbrush. John Milton was exiting the building and I watched him walk to the waiting vehicle like the world was his and New York City was nothing more than the throne room of his castle.</p><p>My soul recoiled as if in blasphemy while the man drove away, the cars vanishing into oblivion around him until even his modern Satanic limo had disappeared as well and I stared at a vacant city street where only the cold, souless architecture had been given immortality by Jesus Christ's death.</p><p>"Erin..."</p><p>"Erin..." I heard through my sadness.</p><p>"Yes," I whispered with sore lips and an odd taste in my mouth.</p><p>"Erin...could you forgive me if I did something horrible to you?"</p><p>Traffic returned to the street and I felt for one frightening moment that there was no glass between me and the world outside of the tower of Babel like law firm. If I leaned too forward, I knew, I would fall to the ground, making the same mistake, intentional or not, that Mary Ann Lomax had committed months before after consuming Christabella Andreoli's ovaries.</p><p>My back was aching and my buttocks felt bruised almost but I slowly turned to meet Kevin Lomax's eyes, which looked sore and raw, as if he had been crying, though there were no tear stains on his cheeks. His breath smelt different than only a second before and though I tried, I could not place the smell or understand how his breath had changed so quickly. Swallowing I realized it was the taste which was lingering in my own but it was still unfamiliar to me.</p><p>I blinked and realized how sore my eyes were now too.</p><p>"Yes," I replied.</p><p>"Even if I would only do it again?"</p><p>"Yes," I said painfully, my lips throbbing.</p><p>A tear rolled down his cheek then, at last.</p><p>"Do you forgive me?" I asked, hynotized by the sorrow contained in a single drop of water.</p><p>"Why?" he asked, his voice thick like he had just drank something which was a similar consistency.</p><p>"Because I haven't helped you any," I whispered. "You still have your sorrow, God remains silent and everything you love is still gone."</p><p>His hand reached out and touched my cheek, stroking it with his thumb. The look in his eyes, the touch, almost confessed that he had not lost everything he loved, but I could not accept that. God would not allow it, I thought nor would my mind which saw Kevin Lomax as something ethereal in its beauty and myself remaining something earthly and horribly imperfect in its ordinariness. I looked down to prevent myself from believing in another hallucination.</p><p>"The world spins...that's its most cruel and merciful response to our bereavements. No death is enough to stop it from turning...but it hurls us towards forgetting too. That can be a blessing."</p><p>"You're wrong," Kevin Lomax said rubbimg my skin with his thumb. "You are helping me. One day I'll let you know how."</p><p>I looked at him again, my confused expression not hidden from him. He read it and then gently tapped my large nose with his index finger. "You really are cute, you know...you still look so much like a child sometimes...so innocent."</p><p>"Do I?" I asked. "Do you consider that a good thing?"</p><p>"Yeah," he said and added wryly. "There isn't much of that left in the world. Believe me, I'm a lawyer. I know."</p><p>The door suddenly opened and Kevin Lomax's secretary entered, looking irritated. "Your mother is <em>still</em> on the line. She's about to call down fire and brimstone if you don't take her call."</p><p>Kevin Lomax swore and then looked at me with an expression that clearly said, "Sorry but I told you so."</p><p>* * *</p><p>On my way out from the office on legs that felt odd, I saw the secretary putting the call through to her boss and I froze as her words fully struck me. "Did you say that Mrs. Lomax was <em>still</em> on hold?" I asked her. I had been in with Kevin for quite a while before he had even broached winning his last trial but hadn't heard anything about a call</p><p>"No," the woman replied. "I didn't say anything like that. I just told Mr. Lomax that his mother had called and that she was ready to have a tantrum if he didn't take it."</p><p>I studied her closely for a few seconds before walking away, certain that she had begun to smile the moment my back was turned.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Another night; another dream.</p><p>Kevin and I were standing by his large window. I had just finished seeing the limo bearing John Milton drive off down a street where the traffic remained existing as the world kept spinning.</p><p>I was the only thing that had infact stopped.</p><p>Suddenly I felt the man pull his hand out from mine so he could grab me forcefully by my shoulders and throw me harshly up against the glass. The impact of it shook both it and my body and I cried out as the wind was knocked from my lungs. Angry that my breath had escaped his consumption, Kevin clutched my head and began to kiss me passionately but with its own small measure of pain.</p><p>I groaned in discomfort, my previously damaged throat one of the few things which had the power to work.</p><p>"Did that hurt?" he asked breaking the kiss and resting his face in the nestle of my neck and shoulder. "I can make you feel good, Erin...you want to feel good?"</p><p>"No," I whispered but Kevin Lomax was getting on his knees before me regardless.</p><p>The lawyer lifted my black habit and held it up like a tent a child would make out of a bedsheet. He crawled underneath it, letting it fall around him.</p><p>"Don't," I begged as I felt his fingers grab the edges of my underwear and pull them down to around my clean white ankles. Hands grasped each exposed cheek as Kevin pressed his face into my now naked crotch and kissed the bit of budding flesh he found quickly blooming there.</p><p>I moaned feeling warm lips surrounding it and warmer tongue beginning to tease it. Pressure with its own specific heat found me below the waist where the lawyer was ravenously tasting me. The sound of pleasure that flew out from my throat made the glass tremble again behind me like more teardrops on water.</p><p>The lawyer's hands left my butt to pull my habit up to my waist and my buttocks was pressed up against the cool glass of the window as Kevin spread my legs. I knew that if anyone looked they would see a nun's ample ass on full display in the law firm's window. With my legs spread they would also now see a man in a suit between them feasting on forbidden fruit.</p><p>"Please, don't...no...don't," I moaned while my body only cried out to him quite the opposite plea. "Please, yes...oh please, YES!" it was professing with each trick of his clever tongue, the same used to help save an army of the guilty from their deserved punishment.</p><p>Then, too, it was bringing me to my own release. Cream was spilling out from me and Kevin's tongue went to lap it up.</p><p>The door suddenly opened and I watched as Lomax's secretary entered. Kevin gradually lifted up the habit he was hiding under and looked at his secretary with calm but annoyed impatience. The woman took in the sight of my violation and I suddenly helplessly pleaded, "Please, help me," to her blank face.</p><p>The woman chose not to, however. Instead, with utmost professionalism, she lowered her cool gaze to her employer. "There's a call from your mother on line 2," the secretary stated. "Should I put her through."</p><p>"Put her on hold; I'm busy," Kevin replied all business like.</p><p>I watched in fear and sorrow as the secretary left the room.</p><p>Once she was gone, my assailant continued his feasting. His hands came to my slit and his fingers crawled in going to the source of my spilling. They only called forth more of my body's seemingly neverending natural fluid. They found the sensitive nerves inside and manipulated them while he continued to suckle my fully aroused clit. The resulting building of bliss led to a climax which made me scream loudly. My cry was sharp and piercing and I felt the glass behind me cracking while the attorney drank the cream which was flooding out from my convulsing hole. The crack grew and I called out ever louder as it shattered at my back and I went falling.</p><p>"KEVIN!"</p><p>My hand reached out, but though, I expected it to grab only air it found Lomax's fingers instead. They were still covered and wet from my fluid but the man would not let me fall away from him. I saw his tears as he pulled me towards him and into his waiting arms. He kissed me with even more passion after the almost loss of me. Tasting myself on his tongue, I closed my eyes and opened them to remember nothing...</p><p>It was the same that night in the Abbey as a phone ringing suddenly disturbed my sleep and stole away memories from me. Blinking, I struggled awake. In the darkness of my room, I listened to the persistent ringing from a caller whom refused to give up and an abbey full of nuns whom refused to answer it. Growing steadily disturbed by the sound of the phone being ignored, I threw the covers from off my plump body, intending to rise and answer it myself. As I climbed out of bed, something fell out from beneath my dress. I blushed, realizing it was more than that: the item had not only fallen out from my nightgown but from my body, itself, between my vaginal lips.</p><p>The ringing stopped momentarily while I stared at a cream covered plain gold wedding band.</p><p>When the phone started to ring again, I clutched the wet ring in my palm and rushed to answer it.</p><p>The corridors were dark and empty; moonlight entering in through the windows, the sound of ringing and memory alone led me to the specific phone which the caller had chosen to call.</p><p>It was in the Reverend Mother's office, I discovered, and the door opened easily enough. I made my way to the noisy phone like I was sleepwalking and not fully awake as I was. Shame and guilt flooded me at the knowledge that I was trespassing into the Reverend Mother's office without her consent. However, the urge to answer the call was undeniable, as was the curiosity of whom was as persistent as the man knocking from Jesus' parable of the friend at night.</p><p>"Hello?" I answered.</p><p>"Is this Erin?" a woman's voice asked, accented like Kevin Lomax's own.</p><p>"Yes," I replied not knowing whom the stranger was on the other end of the line</p><p>"You've been spending time with my son, Kevin, haven't you?" the woman asked and I finally knew that the woman was not a true stranger at all but Mrs. Lomax, the woman whom had put the fear of God into her son and driven him away from His tender embrace.</p><p>"Kevin told you about me?" I asked both happy and confused.</p><p>"Yes...look you gotta stay away from him. You gotta stay away from my son!"</p><p>I shook my head, a gesture it was hopeless for her to see. My mind rushed to gain some level of understanding to why the woman would be phoning me in the dead of night to tell me to stay away from her son. Believing it was because she feared I was after Kevin sexually, I sought to reassure her even as the cream covering the man's wedding band almost burned into the skin on my palm and my cunt twitched to life with the forbidden and unremembered touch of how it had gotten there.</p><p>"Mrs. Lomax, I'm a nun," I soothed her. "You don't have anything to worry about; I won't hurt your son."</p><p>"A nun? You think that matters to either of them?" she asked in desperation. "I'm not worried about Kevin. Not anymore...I lost him already. I'm worried about <em>you</em>. I don't want him to hurt <em>you</em>!" she declared.</p><p>The ring fell out from my hand and hit the hardwood floor just as Kevin had saved me from doing on the street outside of the law firm he had sold his soul to.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>Very bad week last week. Hope this one is better.</p><p>In this chapter, I think, I deal a bit with my problem with forgiveness...I always forgive people whom hurt me but have a hard time when I see them still behaving just as badly. I don't like that they never learned anything but will likely go and hurt someone else. I know they say forgiveness is to help me too but it never works out that way. The only peace I ever get is in the forgetting.</p><p>We also have something that struck me as sad a day or two ago. I lost a neighbour to cancer last year. I think about her often. I thought if how the world has moved on without her. It made me devastated in a way. Things just continue...It made me recall the song "The World Spins" with lyrics by David Lynch. It sums it up very well, that particular awareness and sadness.</p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Metal Angel in the Sky</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Mrs. Lomax drops a little information before the Reverend Mother informs me that Kevin is going away to Italy on vacation.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Sorry for the end note. It's my oddest yet. It's meant to be funny but it is all true too. :/</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The silence on the other end of the phone tricked me into thinking for a few blissful seconds that I was still back in my bedroom and that this was just another odd dream I was suffering. Hearing the phone ring in the dead of night, my eerie journey through the seemingly dead and moonlit Abbey corridors and Alice Lomax's warning were all not real. Any second now the voice would change into someone else's (perhaps Mickey Mouse's?) as dreams often did. Or maybe I'd find myself in some other location.</p><p>Back in my room if I were lucky.</p><p>The cream covered, golden wedding band, lying by my feet, was also some sleeping delusion, I comforted myself. Surely it was still on Kevin Lomax's finger somewhere in the city while his mother was in Florida, either sleeping or praying instead of calling up a young nun she did not know.</p><p>"Child, you have got to stay away from Kevin. He's not my boy anymore. He's his," the woman's voice returned, remaining the same and shattering my hopes.</p><p>"Whose?" I asked in helpless ignorance.</p><p>"His father's," she replied. "Ever since Mary Ann killed herself, Kevin has turned to his father for consolation. He feels responsible and he's trying to damn himself just like he believes Mary Ann is."</p><p>My soul turned cold. Used to the severity of frozen Canadian winters, I was well familiar with the sensation, how the ground could feel soft and warm one night only to wake up the next morning to find the earthen floor beneath shoes, heading to school, unweilding and changed. That was what I felt inside of myself in that moment: a cold unrelenting hardness. Mary Ann Lomax had taken her own life. Her fall had been by choice and my faith proclaimed her damned for it. Her grieving husband now sought a similar fate to ease his guilt. It would be easy to believe that Alice Lomax was crazy and her words were as false as those of the doomsday prophets on the street corners, proclaiming that the world was going to end by next Saturday.</p><p>Only I had spent enough time around Kevin Lomax to know that what she was saying was true. Every conversation I had shared with the attorney was laced with a certain fatalism. I didn't need to rely on his mother's word for it; from his own beautiful lips, I had heard Kevin confess his wish to be damned.</p><p>"Who <em>is</em> Kevin's father, Mrs. Lomax?" I asked.</p><p>"He's that horrible man," she spat. "He's..."</p><p>The phone went dead and I looked down to see two long, white fingers on the main body on the phone, specifically the part which ended a call. The fingers led to the black sleeve of a habit and I followed it upward to the blank countenance of the Reverend Mother. Her face looked odd in the bare light provided by the desk lamp. It cast shadows upwards on the wrinkled terrain, which made it look like some ghoul or undertaker from an old black and white horror film. I almost dropped the receiver out of my hand but kept my grip on it somehow, not wanting to need to bend in order to retrieve it.</p><p>"This office is not to be used for <em>personal</em> calls, Sister Erin," she chastised with pure disdain.</p><p>"It was ringing," I explained weakly. "Didn't you hear it?"</p><p>"I was with Sister Johanne in instruction," the Reverend Mother commented. "I could not have been bothered. The answering machine would have taken care of it."</p><p>My eyes went to the office door which was closed but where a light could be seen underneath. I turned back to the old woman and found my foot instinctively stepping on and concealing the wedding band from her attention.</p><p>"Whom was on the phone?" she asked still as full of contempt as before.</p><p>I could not answer. To say it had been Alice Lomax seemed to be endangering her somehow. While her voice had sounded strong, there had been a lingering fear beneath it, like old paint on a wall hidden under fresh wallpaper. Though, I hated to lie again, I felt as if I couldn't tell the truth without hurting Kevin's mother. And while her words made me doubt him, I still had no doubt about my feelings for the man himself.</p><p>"It was a man. A Mr. Carlson. He asked if we could give him and his family guidance some night if possible. I said he would have to make arrangements with you during the day."</p><p>The woman tilted her head. "How <em>sensible</em> of you," she replied.</p><p>A creaking sound of floorboards came and I returned my eyes to the door of the Reverend Mother's office, where I saw a crack of light to its side now alongside the light underneath it. One of Johanne's eyes was now looking at me. I saw a flash of her body before she closed the door and it looked the pink of flesh not the black of habit.</p><p>"Now I think you should go back to your room and get some sleep," the Reverend Mother commanded more than suggested.</p><p>Without a single hint of fear, shame or innocence she walked to the office door, seeming once again as if she was gliding on air. She disappeared inside, leaving me alone to retrieve the ring from under my foot and departing before I had the chance to believe that I had dreamt the whole thing and merely been sleepwalking in nightmares.</p><p>* * *</p><p>In the morning, I sat eating breakfast at a long wooden table lined in black and trying to deal with both what Mrs. Lomax had told me and the fact that Sister Johanne's attitude toward me had dropped a few degrees lower than the usual chilly temperature she reserved for me. She would not look at me intentionally but whenever she did in accident her head would jolt backwards and her expression would become pinched. This bothered me only in so far as strengthening my belief of what I thought I had glimpsed through the Reverend Mother's office. Sister Johanne's life was separate from mine, however, and though the suspicions I now held were uncomfortable, they did not outweigh the warning from Kevin's mother inside of my thoughts.</p><p>Alice Lomax's fear for me had been so great it had outweighed her natural inclinations as a mother. Unfortunately, the phone call had ended before I had learned whom Kevin's real father was or heard how I fit into the lawyer's hope to assure for himself a perceived seat in hell beside his beloved dead wife.</p><p>Unable to eat my porridge, I stirred it around the bowl and confronted my own beliefs regarding suicide. I could not believe that the God I worshiped would damn somebody simply because they had been in so much pain and emotional turmoil that they had killed themselves. Jesus had been the image of his own Father, I had been taught. That somebody whom could heal a Roman soldier's ear could condemn a broken spirit or mind to hell seemed impossible to me. So I rejected it, my Protestant upbringing rising to the surface again. But if Kevin Lomax was willingly preparing to commit an act which would hurt someone beside himself, I knew that this could secure his wishful separation from God and heaven.</p><p>I remembered falling into hell with the stone angel Lomax, our naked bodies in an embrace and I thought of the various faces I had seen in the fire. Never having seen Mary Lomax before, I knew that I would be trying to rectify that soon with a trip to the library in order to see if I had dreamt of her lost in the flames. My hand was at my chest while I made my plans, playing with the wedding band I was wearing on a plain piece of string around my neck so it would not disappear like the imp statue had.</p><p>"Sister Erin! You haven't touched your food!" I heard Sister Beatrice bemoan and I jumped a foot in the air. "Are you still unwell?"</p><p>"No," I said, smiling up at her from over my shoulder. "Simply not hungry."</p><p>She shook her head in the fretful worry that was as common to her as her whimple was. "If you want to run it in to Sister Caroline then..."</p><p>I nodded and stood, grabbing the still full bowl. As I was walking away, I heard Johanne make some critical remark to Sister Sarah, whom was sitting by her side, and knew that my absence had already improved the novice's mood incredibly.</p><p>In the kitchen, I expected to find Sister Caroline. Instead the room was empty, dishes stacked high on the counter and the large pot, where the ghastly porridge had begun its day, was burning on the stove. I turned it off and oversaw the cleaning of both the bowl and the pot myself. Standing over the sink, letting the stubborn water weater finally warm up, I glanced out the window and saw at last where Sister Caroline had gone to.</p><p>On certain mornings, a delivery boy arrived from the local grocers. He was a short young man in his early twenties, with longish blond hair and vacant green eyes. Sister Caroline had often been entrusted to speak with the man named Maxwell whenever he showed up at the Abbey's back door delivering the week's groceries.</p><p>Only this morning, it seemed that Maxwell had a <em>different</em> back door in mind and was not only delivering groceries.</p><p>Out in the small garden, where in the spring we had planted tomato plants, beans and other vegetables, Sister Caroline was on her hands and knees, the skirt of her habit flung over her back, while the local delivery boy was giving it to her analy. He was thrusting forward in glee, a box of groceries, including more bland porridge, by his legs. On her plump face, Caroline wore an expression which told me that the act was completely consensual and that she was enjoying it every bit as much as her lover was.</p><p>I backed away from the window and the scene, placing a wet hand over my mouth. I immediately tasted the soap I had been using on my tongue but believed it would have been better served on my eyes. I could not get the image of the nun and the delivery man out of my mind and the resulting arousal it stirred in me. I saw my face instead of Caroline's suddenly and Kevin Lomax's red, engorged cock being thrusted into my white and round ass. Backing away in horror, I fled from the kitchen only to crash into someone behind me.</p><p>"Sister Erin!" the Reverend Mother cried. "One must look where they are going or they risk the safety of other's and might lose their way as well."</p><p>"I was going to the daily devotions," I stated, my face feeling as red as one of the tomatoes grown out in the tiny garden where Sister Caroline was being sodomized by Maxwell.</p><p>"Not today," she corrected coldly. "Today you are going to Kennedy Airport to meet with Kevin Lomax before he heads off to Italy on vacation."</p><p>"Italy?" I repeated, feeling my heart tremble and almost shatter.</p><p>"Yes," the woman said with a genuine smile. "The starting point of our faith."</p><p>"My apologies but shouldn't we consider Eden our begginning and end, Reverend Mother?" I asked.</p><p>She looked at me with the most proud look of anger I had ever seen on her ancient face before ignoring my remark completely to continue with her news. "Lomax has decided he needs a vacation after his last victorious case and Mr. Milton has enforced it. He will be gone for two weeks time, after which he will return and you can resume your sessions together. But right now you are to meet him at Kennedy before he leaves."</p><p>I looked down to the floor and felt suddenly very tired. I was constantly being thrown here or there, being given little time to find my footing or some peace and rest while my world seemed to be fracturing along with my grip on reality. Playing once more with the ring around my neck, I considered how this extended to my emotions also. I had no moment to catch that small moment to reflect and ask God for His wisdom and grace. No sooner had I received a mysterious and ominous message from Lomax's mother to stay away from him then I heard that Kevin himself was distancing himself from me by his own volition. I was left to wonder if his mother was merely being paranoid as Kevin had confessed to me she was prone to become during her darker moments. Or was she telling me the truth and Kevin Lomax meant me harm?</p><p>Then there was my own heart which did not simply lament the fact that Kevin would be so far away from him but dreaded it to an overpowering degree. My heart was broken but odder still my body seemed to be suffering a physical withdrawal at the thought of such a large distance between us, some pain crying out shamefully from the area below my waist.</p><p>"Or would you rather take your devotions?" the Reverend Mother asked.</p><p>"I'll go see him," I whispered, an ache in both my heart and my groin. The first I could explain, the other confused and terrified me.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Walking through the door to Kennedy, I was approached by a bald middle aged business man with a thick brown moustache. In his hand he held some loose change and some five dollar bills besides. "Good," he said, spotting me. "I hate handling fucking change. Take this and put it in your poor box. Now remember <strong>only</strong> put that in the box!" he further snapped and stormed off, hailing a cab. I watched him go and sighed not knowing where to put the money either.</p><p>Inside of Kennedy, I made my way to the gift store where Kevin had said that he would meet me.</p><p>Waiting inside, the businessman's money still trapped inside my hand, I watched a very young boy holding a teddy bear, a price tag dangling from its brown, furry wrist. He kept hugging it tightly and then turning to his mother whom kept shaking her head and saying words that were becoming more short and angry. "No!" she finally spat and the child placed the bear back on the shelf, casting longing glances at it while he was ignored.</p><p>I opened my hand, studying the money lying on my palm and then the bear with the sad little mouth sitting lonely on the shelf. "Wait here," I told the boy as his mother continued to read People.</p><p>When I returned my hand was empty save for the bear which I handed to the little boy. He held it with great joy and affection. His mother, on the other hand, looked at the sight in embarrassment. She placed the magazine back on the rack with her fingerprint left in ink on Robert De Niro's face. I watched them leaving with my own certain longing for something I could never have and never be.</p><p>"You would have made a good mother," I heard a southern accented voice say behind me.</p><p>I turned around to find Kevin Lomax staring at me with an expression that appeared to contain almost every emotion under God's sky. Fondness, confusion, anger, sadness and joy floated to the top and I studied the singular beauty of his face wondering what child we would create if his fine features were mixed with my own not so fine ones.</p><p>"I love children," I stated. "But they frighten me too. They don't censor themelves, do they? Not like adults. They are truthful to the point of being painful."</p><p>"He liked you though," Kevin said with a nod in the direction of the boy whom was no longer there.</p><p>"I bought his love with money I was supposed to give to the poor," I answered in guilt.</p><p>Kevin Lomax held his left index finger up to his lips and leaned forward. "<em>Shhhh</em>," I'll never tell," he whispered.</p><p>The attorney grabbed my hand and started pulling me towards the airport's runway. "Kevin!" I cried, the wind blowing my habit around furiously as we stepped outside into the wind.</p><p>"Mary Ann wanted kids so badly," he commented. "That's what really drove her over the edge. Christabella started taunting her with that fact and lying...saying we were lovers and how she'd have my children. I fucking well tried to protect my Mare that time and it still all went to hell."</p><p>"Did <em>you</em> want children?" I asked.</p><p>Kevin stopped dragging me and turned to see my habit blowing all around and making loud sounds as the fabric whipped back and forth. "I wanted Mary Ann...I used to want children. I don't know...maybe part of me still does."</p><p>Although it lacked any sense of reason, I suddenly felt the strongest urge to make love to him on the runway under the sunlight. I saw myself tearing the clothing off of his trim body, from the trenchcoat to the casual suit underneath and him doing the same with me. I pictured straddling him on the cement and riding him until his cock went off inside of me and offered my womb every last drop of his seed. The vision was strong but, unlike the ones I had been suffering from as of late, it came from me. It was born from the fact that I was a woman and he was a man and our bodies could unite and create the child he claimed to still want and that I wanted too.</p><p>It was born equally out of my love and lust for Kevin Lomax.</p><p>I was grateful when a plane abruptly appeared in the sky over us, stealing me away from my unchaste daydream.</p><p>"Do you want children?" Kevin asked and I laughed with regret.</p><p>"Like you," I answered. "A part of me does. I have to deny it though."</p><p>"Like your pretty hair," Lomax said with bitterness.</p><p>He turned away again and pulled me towards a small private plane I now saw in the distance. There was a man standing on the boarding ramp by the door.</p><p>"COME ON KEVIN!" John Milton shouted. "VENICE WILL HAVE FINALLY SUNK BY THE TIME WE GET THERE!"</p><p>Seeing the short man in the small plane's doorway, I shivered as it finally occurred to me whom Kevin's real father was.</p><p>"He's going with you?" I stated.</p><p>"Yes," Kevin answered and stopped to face me.</p><p>"Why did you want me here?" I asked.</p><p>He took a step closer towards me and gazed intently at my face. "Three reasons, Sister Erin," Kevin Lomax replied. "First to say a prayer for me. I hate traveling by plane. I also <em>hate</em> John Milton. He doesn't know that yet, but I do. I want you to say a prayer that I survive this little trip both physically and spiritually."</p><p>"I will," I promised.</p><p>Lomax swallowed. "Second, I wanted to see you before I left. You've come to mean so much to me."</p><p>His hand touched my cheek and my foolish heart felt as high as the planes when they touched the clouds.</p><p>"Third," Kevin started...</p><p>"KEVIN!" John Milton shouted and there was more than just impatience in his voice then; there was anger too.</p><p>The man, whose hand still lingered on my cheek, turned to look at his employer and something dark and unknown passed between them. When Kevin returned his gaze to me, he did not finish his sentence but instead lowered my veil and removed my coif. My hair fell free again before him in loose curls caught by the wind. The lawyer ran his fingers through them in adoration. "So many things still don't make sense to me...everybody promises answers, your God and His opposite and all the people in between. And I still can't understand any of it. I'm still the fucking little boy in the front pew thinking it's all a crock of shit."</p><p>"That's what faith is," I said softly. "Believing that one day it will make sense even if it doesn't now."</p><p>Kevin smiled sadly and leaned forward. "See you when I get back, <em>Mother</em> Erin," he whispered into my ear, his voice thick with either sadness or desire, and then gently kissed my cheek.</p><p>I watched the lawyer walk to the plane door, where he turned to look at me once, my hair still blowing in a frenzy about my pale face. Then John Milton pulled him almost forcefully into the plane, stealing him momentarily from my eyes. The door shut but I stood frozen in place staring at the plane and the windows until Kevin's face soon appeared to resume our gaze, both mutual and filled with sadness and an impending loneliness.</p><p>My eyes never left the plane once while it ascended to heaven, some monstrous metal angel made by man. When it was stolen completely from my vision, like the boy with his teddy bear, I found myself fighting desolation. For two weeks I would not be seeing Kevin Lomax. For two weeks I would not see his smile nor feel the arms I had come to believe were an earthly stand in for God's wrapped around my body in a comforting embrace.</p><p>Weeping in desperation, feeling as low as I ever had during my moments of spiritual doubt and disbelief, my hand pulled out the string around my neck for comfort, realizing I had not returned the ring to the lawyer as I had planned, along with my question of how it had ended hidden up my vagina.</p><p>Nothing was at the end of the plain string, however.</p><p>I closed my eyes and saw in finely detailed memory Kevin Lomax bringing his left hand to his mouth in slowed down motion. "<em>Shhhh</em>, I'll never tell," he whispered like some angelic dark magician while the fourth finger on the same hand bore a familiar band of shining gold.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>As I said earlier, I've been reading some of your old interviews and I saw where your old girlfriend (Autumn Macintosh again? Whenever I hear that name it reminds me that it's apple season here in Canada and I need to go pick some up) wanted to go swimming with the dolphins. I don't share that desire. First off, I can't swim so I would drown. :/ Secondly, I know too much about dolphins to want to do that.</p><p>I double checked recently, just to be sure, and I was right. Dolphins really have wonderful publicists. They make them look so wonderful, peaceful and intelligent. In reality, dolphins aren't so great. They gang rape their females for hours, kill their babies to induce heats and kill baby porpoises just for sport. Turns out their sonar makes it easy for them to target the poor baby's weakest areas and then they torment them for a while beforehand.</p><p>Along with that lovely bit of info, I discovered that Otters are also very violent. Which is sad because a friend gave me a birthday card with one and I thought it was so cute. :/ Seals can also be bad. So can ducks. But I knew all about that one.</p><p>My mom got my sister and I ducks for pets. She'd later brag about how it was to teach us the facts of life. We'd often see the two males take the poor female and mate with her as they held her head under water. She got pregnant often and finally ended up mating with her son, who didn't try to kill her, at least. He also mated with his sister. </p><p>Wow! That was the facts of life? Pretty harsh and fucked up.</p><p>Dinky, the mother duck's, butt was so heavy from laying eggs it literally was dragging on the ground. She went missing one night. I tried to play Sherlock once to find out what happened to her. I went to the other side of the pens my mom made. Behind them there was a row of thick evergreens. Behind her pen was a rope noose with her feathers all around it. That always bothered me. I never knew what it meant or what had happened to her really.</p><p>I thought of three of the other ducks actually as Merteuil, Valmont and Tourvel from Dangerous Liaisons. Sorry. I didn't know you from that film at the time or you might have wound up as one of my ducks.</p><p>There were also two lesbian ducks. The one would mount the other and then they'd both go and make nests and lay eggs on either side of their little barn. I'm not sure what the top duck was exactly thinking. But anyway they would sit on the eggs thinking they were going to hatch while the eggs were just getting older and more rotten. </p><p>One day, a friend came over and one of the ducks accidentally smashed one of her eggs. It was like that scene in "Charlotte's Web" and it smelled so bad the friend ran back home and never ever came back. But that was okay because she was kind of annoying and my sister and I embezzled $10 out of her for a teen pinup front yard sale business we were all going to set up together. </p><p>Not sure if you were any of the pinups either.</p><p>...</p><p>What the hell was I talking about again? Oh yeah. I gotta go pick up some apples.</p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Prayers in a Stolen Church</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As Kevin and John meet with an important figure in Rome in a televised event, I struggle with my feelings. However, after being summoned to a building for another bit of spiritual counseling, things take another frightening turn...</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I had to add another chapter to this fic. Which means if I'm hoping for a Halloween final chapter, I'm gonna have to post sometime during the weekday sometime before the 31st too and not just Sunday/Monday.</p><p>I'm very tired because I realized last week that I needed to do a Canadian Thanksgiving entry to the series for Monday. But I had promised to update my Zootopia fic on the Friday befors and I also needed to do a chapter for "Across the Fiery Desert..." and this to reach their ETA. Plus, I have to get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving. Add to that, I'm nervous about my sleep test and need to get emotionally prepared for it. But, hopefully, tomorrow I will get the Heaver fic posted. I'll be thankful if I can! </p><p>Then I can collapse on Tuesday. Yup. Definitely gonna collapse. :D &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I never stopped praying for Kevin Lomax while he was away. Some supplication was always on my tongue and lips and I often visited the small cathedral beside the Abbey to pray to my God for healing for the man.</p><p>Trying to occupy myself during Kevin's absence, I was able to visit the library and finally see Mary Ann Lomax, even if it was from photographs in back issues of newspapers. Among stacks of books, old editions mixed with those far more recent, and microfilm and computers, the past seeming to meet with the future, I found myself comparing and despairig while I committed the deadly sin of envy. Staring at her undeniable beauty, her blonde hair indeed falling around her almost cherubic face in curls, and some images showing her trim and sexy body, I wondered why Kevin never kept a photograph of his late wife in his office, even though to do so would have made me constantly aware of my own inadequacies. She had been gorgeous and he had loved her completely, yet no image of her graced his office desk or walls at Milton, Chadwick and Waters.</p><p>Suddenly I thought of Mary Ann's photo being placed anywhere in the hallways of the law firm and shivered at the thought, feeling simultaneously nauseous. Something didn't feel right about her angelic face being in a room surrounded by the cold corridors and the laughter made behind the backs of those visitors passing through them.</p><p>
  <em>"I also hate John Milton. He doesn't know that yet, but I do."</em>
</p><p>It became clear to me that while Lomax had damned himself by accepting a job at John Milton's firm, one where he defended people he seemed to know were guilty, he had not wished for his wife to be with him there, seeing her image day in and day out in the firm's corrupt heart.</p><p>Kevin Lomax already suffered enough images of his wife burning in hell.</p><p>Turning the machine off on Mary Ann's stunning photographic smile, in a picture beside the story of how she had killed her supposed rival, feasted upon the same victim and then fell to her death from several stories on high, I thought of how he need not have worried.</p><p>When I had fallen into hell, wrapped in the embrace of the stone angel of the grieving widower, I had not seen the face of the one it kept watch over included amongst the faces of the damned who were waiting for us.</p><p>* * *</p><p>"I guess, you miss your boyfriend," Sister Caroline said a few days after Kevin Lomax and John Milton had left for Italy.</p><p>"Kevin Lomax is my <em>friend</em>," I corrected, trying to concentrate on the porridge I was eating and forget about the fact that it had been by a delivery boy's legs while he had been fornicating with the woman whom was now teasing me.</p><p>"Friend?" Sister Johanne stated, back to her usually condemning self. "He is meant to be the man you are guiding and nothing more."</p><p>The porridge sat in a lump in my throat where once a stone imp had made its journey upward in order to be vomited into a toilet bowl. Or, at least, I <em>thought </em>that it had. With the object no longer sitting in my drawer, I had no proof. And I had been too ashamed to show it to any of the other nuns, believing its conception to have occurred from sucking on a stone angel's cock, a statue that looked like the man I was missing and whom I shared a relationship with which was currently being speculated about.</p><p>I saw Sister Sarah raise a hand to her mouth, whispering behind it to her two best friends in the Abbey. Her five fingers and palm were not enough to keep her words from me and I dropped the spoon back into my bowl after hearing them.</p><p>"Maybe she's pregnant under the habit," the novice nun had whispered cruelly. "It would be hard to tell especially since she's fat."</p><p>"Excuse me," I said, pushing my chair back and grabbing my unfinished bowl, ready to return it to the kitchen where Sister Beatrice had volunteered for kitchen duty that morning.</p><p>I heard the other sisters laughing behind me as I went and did not want to know where their conversation turned without my being there. I thought of the other novices surrounding us whom had possibly overheard the gossip but had just sat and allowed it, either secretly agreeing or finding it just as unnecessary vulgar but keeping their mouths shut in cowardice. Walking towards the kitchen, I began to wonder if other Abbeys were as filled with jealousy, ridicule and judgements as our own. It hardly seemed Christian and was surely frowned upon.</p><p>Sister Beatrice was at the sink already taking care of a dirty pot when I entered the kitchen. She looked in disappointment at the bowl and then up at me, her habit looking very black against the yellow rubber gloves on her hands. "Again?" she tsked. "Sister Erin, I'm beginning to worry that you have developed one of those eating disorders you hear about," she commented in concern.</p><p>"No," I replied. "Just not hungry again."</p><p>"Are you missing Kevin Lomax?" she asked, far more kindly than my fellow novice sisters and their far more hurtful remarks.</p><p>"Yes," I admitted to her.</p><p>"Don't worry. He'll be back soon enough," she comforted, patting my shoulder and then looking ashamed as she realized that she'd left some suds on it. "It's good to have a friend," she quickly added before returning to scrubbing away at the stubborn oatmeal.</p><p><em>"Friend?"</em> I heard Johanne saying crystal clear in my mind.<em> "He is meant to be the man you are guiding and nothing more."</em></p><p>"Sister Beatrice?"</p><p>"Yes?"</p><p>"When was the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart first formed?"</p><p>The older nun dropped her scrubbing tool into the sink and eyed me with even more worry than was normal for her. "I'm not supposed to say," she whispered. "The Reverend Mother was very strict about it...that I not tell them that they're the first ones..."</p><p>A yellow glove flew to her mouth and I could almost taste the suds and latex. "Oh, dear! Oh no! I shouldn't have said!"</p><p>"I won't tell," I said, it being my time to soothe her then. "But...we're the first order here? But the place looks so old and the cathedral..."</p><p>"The building used to belong to another convent," Beatrice said in an even lower whisper. "They disbanded in the fifties...the Reverend Mother...she told me that she had been looking to create a new one...seems she has had many before...She has taken this one without the Bishop's consent."</p><p>My confusion was evidently written across my face and she began to fret again. "I shouldn't have said anything!" she cried.</p><p>"It's all right," I consoled some more. "But tell me, please, is the fact of it being new...well, was that why I was allowed in?"</p><p>Beatrice nodded, having given up on words, afraid that the bricks of the building we had practically confiscated would overhear and tell her superior about her loose lips.</p><p>I nodded too. Things had suddenly become a little clearer to me about the true reason I had been admitted to the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, despite my youth and previous life as a Protestant, and why the other nuns behaved sometimes as they did and were permitted to.</p><p>"Thank you," I commented and began to take care of emptying the bowl of its contents into another container to suffer later on in the day so it would not go to waste.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Following choir practice, I was told by a Sister Deirdre that there was a call waiting for me in the Reverend Mother's office. At first, I thought it was Alice Lomax again as I walked quickly to the office where the older nun was waiting.</p><p>"What kept you, Sister Erin?" she demanded impatiently. "Seriously! You have too many stray thoughts in that untidy head of yours and too much weight on your body!"</p><p>I flinched at her remarks, too wounded to answer. Her question seemed rhetorical, however, as she handed the phone to me. "I will leave you alone. I have to speak with Father Murphy anyway."</p><p>As I stared down at the receiver, the Reverend Mother closing the door behind her, I realized that I had not had time to ask her whom was on the other end as I placed it to my ear and answered, "Sister Erin speaking."</p><p>"Ciao from Italy, Sister Erin," Kevin Lomax greeted.</p><p>"Kevin!" I exclaimed, happy that I was alone and the other Sisters could not hear my joy at hearing the man's voice.</p><p>"I was missing my spiritual advisor and thought I'd call to say hi."</p><p>"Hi to you too," I said, seeing the smile on my face reflected in the shining black surface of the Reverend Mother's phone. "How are you?"</p><p>"Bored senseless," Lomax answered. "There are only so many decaying buildings and old statues a good old country boy from Florida can see before he goes crazy. The gondolas are also overrated. Give me an old fashioned motorboat anyday. You get where you want to a hell of a lot faster. How have you been?"</p><p>"I miss you," I replied and quickly added. "I miss our conversations. I worry about you being so far away without anybody to talk to."</p><p>I did not mention how I similarly had no one willing to listen to me.</p><p>"Just a week left...but don't worry about me. In fact, guess who John and I are meeting with tonight?"</p><p>"Who?"</p><p>"His Holiness the Pope," Kevin said with a laugh.</p><p>"Seriously?" I asked in shock.</p><p>"Don't believe me? Ha! Watch tonight. They're going to broadcast a bit of it live on FOX news, from what John said. You can see for yourself. That is <em>if</em> they have a tv set in that Abbey of yours."</p><p>I smirked. "We aren't as medieval as that, Kevin Lomax."</p><p>"Well, how would I know," he countered. "It's not like I've ever been there before. Imagine that: you sneaking me into your room late at night. Is that something you would do now, Sister Erin? Would you let me <em>inside</em>?"</p><p>I brought a trembling hand to my forehead, feeling it becoming wet with sweat as images of Kevin Lomax and I making love on my uncomfortable bed in my plain little room filled my thoughts. He would be the most beautiful item which had ever graced its four walls but I did not tell him this and he spoke again  before I could.</p><p>"Like letting a wolf in amidst the sheep," he said with a laugh which sounded bitter. "Well, I gotta go now. I see John trying to tango with some girl a third his age and twice his height."</p><p>"Kevin," I said hesitantly,  remembering his words about his boss. "Do you really hate him?"</p><p>"Did I say that?" the lawyer asked.</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>"No...he just pounced this whole trip on me without my knowledge and then promised me a shitload of paperwork to handle when I got back. I was just pissed off."</p><p>"Okay," I replied, thinking that, though he sounded sincere, there was still something hidden behind his words, something that had been revealed at Kennedy.</p><p>"Ciao, little sister," Kevin said fondly and there was nothing behind those words, only honest affection.</p><p>"Goodbye Kevin," I said.</p><p>When a click came, telling me the call was over, the devastation I had felt on that same landing strip at the airport where his candid confession had been made returned. I thought of John Milton and the undeniable belief I had felt then that he was Kevin's father.</p><p>Alone in the office, I turned the phone around to face me and dialed the Operator. When she asked me who I wanted her to call, I gave her Kevin's mother's name and the address of the fundamentalist church she ran in Florida. After a few rings, a man picked up the phone and he became the second person I told that I wanted to speak to Alice Lomax within three minutes.</p><p>"I'm sorry, Alice Lomax went to the hospital a week ago. She's in a coma," the man informed, his voice becoming somber.</p><p>I exhaled so sharply it was amazing the phone didn't fly out of my hand and across the room. "Does her son, Kevin, know?"</p><p>"We keep trying to reach him but he's in Italy. His employee, John Milton, told us he'd give him the message but..."</p><p>Swallowing, my mind thought of how it had been a week since I had received the warning from Alice Lomax. "May I ask what happened?" I asked.</p><p>"A snake bit her...By all rights, she should be dead by now. But, praise God, He is saving her," the member of the church stated. "Alice's a good and faithful servant and her faith has always been strong. We perform prayers for her every morning and evening."</p><p>"She has mine too," I told him.</p><p>"Thank you..."</p><p>"Sister Erin," I filled in the missing name.</p><p>"<em>You're</em> Sister Erin?" the man asjed.</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>"She mentioned she wanted to speak to you the day before it happened. Did she say what it was about?"</p><p>"It was about Kevin," I answered. "I've been helping to guide him after his wife's death."</p><p>"Any luck?" the stranger asked, honestly curious.</p><p>"God only knows."</p><p>"Amen," came the reply before we said our goodbyes.</p><p>Still alone in the office with the phone, my first instinct was to contact Kevin again when the Reverend Mother suddenly walked through the door, catching me looking through the papers on her desk.</p><p>"SISTER ERIN!" she exclaimed, presumably her favorite expletive these days. "What do you think you are doing?"</p><p>"I just learned that Kevin's mother is in the hospital," I said. "We must call him back and tell him."</p><p>She eyed me, her expression pinched and disapproving. "And how did you come by this information if it wasn't from Kevin Lomax himself?"</p><p>"I phoned her church in Florida and someone there told me," I answered and instantly knew from her expression that I had said something wrong.</p><p>"And <em>why</em> would you do that? I told you once that this phone is not for personal use and your relationship with Kevin Lomax is not personal, is it. Or should I begin to finally listen to the words and rumors that I hear whispered in the hallways of this Abbey, Miss Smyth?"</p><p>Looking into her eyes, I clearly saw the threat that she was given me, pounded through by the use of my forsaken last name and honorific. If she viewed my relationship with Lomax as anything but professional she would throw me out of the Abbey in disgrace. </p><p>"I merely thought he should know," I said, standing up straight.</p><p>"John Milton will handle it," the Reverend Mother stated. "He's far closer to Kevin Lomax than <em>you</em> are. In fact, the two of them are meeting with his Holiness this evening. I expect all the Sisters to gather in the study to watch it this afternoon."</p><p>"That was what Kevin called to tell me," I stated.</p><p>"Did he? That was considerate of him," she remarked. "But you should warn him that vanity and pride are both sins during your next consulation."</p><p>"I don't think I will need to; he already knows," I replied and thought, <em>"Make one sin, let him in."</em></p><p>* * *</p><p>We all congregated in the study at 2:00 in the afternoon, as the Reverend Mother had requested. There was not room left for me on the couch or the chairs set up by the television set and I stood by a pillar close to the doorway watching his Holiness meeting with various important figures, two of which were John Milton and Kevin Lomax. When the camera went to Kevin, my heart felt itself surge with a horrifying and painful bolt of electricity. I saw sitting by his side a gorgeous creature of obvious Italian descent, her black hair straight and shining on her pale shoulders. I didn't know why, but I had expected him to be alone and the sight of him with someone else was a pain so strong it was almost physical.</p><p>"Looks like you've been replaced," Sister Sarah said, leaning over to whisper into my ear.</p><p>All I could think of to do was whisper sadly, "Her hair isn't even curly," which earned me a look from the other nun like I had lost my mind.</p><p>Live, in real time, I watched Lomax and Milton meet with the Pope as his Holiness blessed John Milton for the kindness he had bestowed upon the church. I saw the unmistakable architecture of the Apostolic Palace surrounding them. Yet my eyes stayed only on Kevin, my heart breaking over his familiar movements and smile just as equally as it did over his great and striking beauty.</p><p>That beauty was evident for everyone to see, of course. Any time the camera focused on him, it was apparent that the artistry God had used in the lawyer's creation shamed that of any work that had been formed by an artist from the country where Lomax had gone on his vacation. And often, I saw the other Sisters turning to look at me in envy as they realized once again the man's fine appearance and that he was the one whom I had been meeting with.</p><p>Infact, when the event had finished, and the group of gathered nuns were leaving the room, they either would not look at me or would do so in contempt or with laughter. A few bumped into me on purpose, while I stood there, frozen in place, still trying to mend the feeling in my heart created by seeing Kevin Lomax with another woman.</p><p>One whom had not sworn herself to God alone and so could belong to him in any way he wished.</p><p>Five minutes afterwards, the Reverend Mother, herself, appeared and walked towards me. "Sister Erin," she said in her primmest tone. "There has been a request for you to consult with a Mrs. Fontiac, a recently bereaved widow and her grieving family this evening at seven o'clock. I told her that you and Sister Johanne would welcome the opportunity to aid them spiritually."</p><p>I looked into her eyes and wanted to tell her no, feeling hardly up to helping anyone spiritually when my own emotions were in turmoil. Still, thinking of a grieving woman and her children, my selfish desires forced me in shame to nod and accept.</p><p>"Is that the woman whom called late that one night?" the Reverend Mother turned to ask while she was walking away.</p><p>I could not think straight. My soul was crying out and my heart felt broken, feeling very much like the fat and foolish nun that I was. Kevin Lomax would not want me. He held no desire for me and the vague images I had been suffering and feelings I had that he was attracted to me in return had all been inside of my mind. For a man who could have an angel like Mary Ann or a temptress like the Monica Bellucci look alike sitting by his side, overweight virgins would hold very little intetest.</p><p>"It must be," I answered back, letting yet another sin in to join the others. </p><p>* * *</p><p>Before I met with Sister Johanne to go to the address given, I went to the cathedral next to the Abbey for the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. Suddenly the name felt quite accurate as I fell into a pew and started to weep. I looked to the altar at the front of the church and then to the large image of the crucified Christ above it.</p><p>"I'm sorry, I'm so weak," I stated. "I don't know what to do. I love you and your Father...I am yours but there's a part of me that's still a woman...and please God, forgive me, I gave it to Kevin without ever meaning to. I'm paying for it now...please God...I'm paying for my sin now. Just forgive me and let me know what I'm supposed to do one day so I can finally please you and be Your daughter."</p><p>The image of Christ looked on me in silence as I broke down into tears in a church the Reverend Mother had stolen.</p><p>* * *</p><p>"This is where we're supposed to meet them?" Johanne asked in confusion.</p><p>For once, I shared her feelings. It wasn't a house at all but a large building that looked like little more than a warehouse of some kind. "I think we should go back," I said, the night sky over New York devoid of stars and seeming very dark and empty.</p><p>It was the wrong thing to say to the other nun. I know that now. Hating me beforehand, her feelings not softened by my stumbling upon the truth behind her <em>instructions</em> with the Reverend Mother, the nun cast me a haughty look and moved toward the building's doorway. "We were sent here to spread God's love and that is what we will do," she snapped before entering.</p><p>Not desiring to suffer guilt for the rest of my life for letting the woman go inside alone, I followed, leaving the ominous sky behind only to be greeted by one far worse.</p><p>At least, for me.</p><p>On the other side of the door, a corridor waited and I saw Sister Johanne already near its end. The corridor had been painted in the exact shade of my horrible and beautiful Devil's Paintbrush. The oranges, yellows and reds were exact to the degree that when I entered the corridor I felt as if I were stepping on to one of its petals. Along the walls were statues of men, no clothing had been carved on their bodies, all of which adorned intimidating erections, and they stood there with leering, lascivious looks on their impish and otherwise classically carved faces.</p><p>"Wait JOHANNE!" I cried out as she reached the far door, painted deepest black, and disappeared inside of it.</p><p>Running down the corridor, I felt as if the statues were peering down at me with lust, ready to fall on me and use their massive cocks on me, each fighting to be the first to abuse the virginal nun, the only reason that they desired me.</p><p>"JOHANNE!" I cried, not understanding what had possessed her to continue down the obscene hallway.</p><p>Flinging the door open, I heard it strike the wall infront of me as I ran into a black which rivaled the sky outside. Just as I had heard it open ahead, I heard it falling shut behind as well, leaving me feeling blind and lost.</p><p>Suddenly in the darkness, a light shone down in the middle of the room. This light revealed a man, short in stature and wearing a suit of crimson, whom was holding on to Sister Johanne. One of his hands was clasped around her mouth while the other held a knife to her throat. I thought it was a man but as my eyes grew stronger I saw that the person was wearing the mask of a lamb, hiding their true sex. Even when they spoke, I could not tell what they were for the voice was distorted and strange.</p><p>"Glad you could finally make it," the sheep said. "I'm Mr. Carlson..."</p><p>
  <em>"It was a man. A Mr. Carlson. He asked if we could give him and his family guidance some night if possible. I said he would have to make arrangements with you during the day."</em>
</p><p>My voice seemed to fill the room of blackness and Mr. Carlson laughed uproariously.</p><p>"And that's my son," he said.</p><p>Hands abruptly gripped my upper arms and I looked over my shoulder, gasping as I saw a much taller man in a red suit behind me. He was looking down at me in the mask of a wolf and I would have screamed if I had not been so terrified.</p><p>A false bleating came from the direction of the similarly frightened Sister Johanne and the maker of the mocked sound of innocence, earning my attention once more.</p><p>"Ready to pay for your sins?" the lamb asked, not prepared to take them on to his own soul and pay for them himself.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>I got my Snowman name today: Angel McSlushy. I like it. I love snowmen and snow.</p><p>I couldn't live in someplace where there is only one season like you do in L.A. I'd feel like I was stuck and would need my spring, summer, fall and winter to feel like I was alive. </p><p>How about you? Do you miss snow or do you come to Canada often? Do you know that it's Thanksgiving on the 12th? I hope you do. I've read interviews where you are happy to be Canadian and others where you wonder why you still are. </p><p>Anyway, I'm grateful that you were Canadian once and here in Ontario, where the leaves change and you can build snowmen or make snow angels. And I hope you still have friends here that will tell you that it's Canadian Thanksgiving so you can spend a few moments to be thankful. There's usually something to be grateful for if you look hard enough.</p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Penance</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The wrong lamb walks me through the steps of my penance with a wolf.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Almost didn't get this done. I thank God that I did.</p><p>On a different note, Alex Winter likely Bill and Ted fanart over on Twitter! Yay! :D &lt;3</p><p>My apologies for this chapter in advance. It's brutal and horrific. </p><p>The end note might make you laugh though.</p><p>"Of Wolf and Man" written by James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett</p><p>"Where Evil Grows" by Terry Jacks</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The lamb held Johanne, his knife aimed at her throat, as if in that moment it was retaliating for all the years of slaughter and sacrificd committed against it. The blade pressed into the white cloth without entering it completely. But it constantly dared that it might with one more heavily pressing of the knife or if she simply made one movement that was too much. I looked at the terrified nun's body and saw that she was holding her breath in her terror and trying not to tremble, a hopeless cause.</p><p>"Tsk...tsk...tsk..." the lamb stated as I felt the wolf's grip tighten on my arms, holding me in place. "You've been telling plenty of lies these days, Sister Erin. We called you on the pretense of you giving us some counseling, and to try to save you from one lie, at least, but you're really the one whom really needs it. Isn't that right? How about you, Sister Johanne? You think she needs it too right?"</p><p>The nun in his arms didn't speak unless she killed herself in the process.</p><p>"What? Why so quiet?" Mr. Carlson asked. "You've never been too afraid to spit out your condemnations and vomit up your critisms before," he added in his distorted but smooth voice. "Isn't that right, my little <em>Sparrow</em>?"</p><p>With that one word, Johanne moved. It didn't seem that she could stop herself. That one pet name caused her eyes to bulge out to the point I was afraid that they would fall out and for her to move her head in an attempt to turn and face her captor. The movement, however, caused the sharpened knife to cut through her coif.</p><p>"Johanne!" I screamed, struggling to break free of the wolf's hold but he geld me only tighter.</p><p>Blood began to seep out, spoiling the pristine white of the cloth. It made what looked like a Rorschach blot done up in red on the fabric beneath the woman's chin.</p><p>"How horrible," Mr. Carlson said in outrage to the nun in his arms whom was weeping now violently. "You've gone and spoiled that lovely habit. Not so pure now. Don't worry about it though. It was only a fucking bunch of shit anyway. And the cut's not serious, just a surface wound...funny, how the surface works. There's so much lying underneath it, yet people judge their opinions only on what they can see, don't they? Like you, Sister Johanne. You seem like the perfect little nun, with her holier than thou attitude. But what lies under the habit? The Reverend Mother knows very well, doesn't she?"</p><p>Johanne made a louder cry before the lamb struck her on her cheek and she fell from his arms and to his feet in a pile of black, white and red. The woman had become a person I no longer recognized. She was holding herself like a small child and whispering words that were too desperate to be easily understood. She seemed too much like a child for me to hold any of the pain she had caused against her and I only wanted to protect her. The lamb raised his knife in the air above the nun, whom was still crying in the fetal position, preparing to bring it down fatally.</p><p>"NO! PLEASE DON'T!" I cried and pleaded, still trying to free myself from the wolf's hands. Although I had no reason to know why, the grip he had on me then felt as strongly as if it were for my own protection than to restrain me.</p><p>The lamb gave another mad bleating, held the knife higher in the air and then brought it down, his legs dropping out beneath him to help speed the blade to his intended target's side. Only the creature stopped itself miraculously before the knife could pierce Johanne's flesh. Instead the sheep landed only on one knee and the tip of the blade stayed poised over my fellow nun's shaking body.</p><p>Human laughter, distorted but still recognizable and hopelessly chilling, came from the lamb mask before the wearer turned to look at me. "I won't kill her, Erin," Mr. Carlson said. "She's gonna be good motivation for helping me and my son show you where you went astray. And to help <em>correct</em> you."</p><p>"What motivation?" I asked.</p><p>The lamb ignored my question and rose to his feet. With suprising power despite his less than intimidating size, he managed to lift the nun by his feet effortlessly up by her whimple. Johanne shrieked again but Carlson ignored her, as well. Walking in the darkness, the spotlight followed him until he came to a small cage, the bars of which possessed long steel spikes like nails on both the inside and outside, making attempts at escape and movement painful and possibly deadly. Carelessly, the lamb tossed the girl inside of the cage.</p><p>I watched, Johanne lying on the floor of it, a lost and desolate look in her blue eyes. My own stayed focused on her as the lamb walked away and the light remained with him, casting the poor nun in pitch black darkness.</p><p>The lamb then stood still once again and faced me, offering me the answer, at last. "Simple. You don't do what I tell you to or I kill her."</p><p>"That doesn't make sense," I argued, feeling my heart pound so loudly that I thought the wolf would feel its vibrations. "Why hurt her to teach me?"</p><p>"You're asking me this when you believe in a God who'd kill His own innocent Son for a group of sinners? If you're looking for logic, Sister Erin, don't expect to find any when discussing theology. That's my motto. I'm just here for a good time, as we all should be."</p><p>"BUT YOU SAID!" I cried out in frustration.</p><p>"I'm a no good fucking liar. Don't listen to what I say. No...wait...sorry. You gotta now or else Sister Johanne will be maggot food."</p><p>My heart was still rapidly beating inside of my chest and I fell against the wolf behind me. His body was strong and definitely male. It reminded me of Kevin's; in fact I hated how I fell into it a little more at the realization, as if seeking comfort from my enemy in my distress simply because he reminded me of the man I loved. Even my buttocks was responding to the wolf's anatomy, which I could feel lying dormant, liking the way the sleeping cock felt against it. I had felt hopeless back at the Abbey seeing Kevin with another woman and now my mind had fled to some false imagining for comfort. It tricked me into almost believing that it was Kevin Lomax whom was restraining me, which only created dark feelings of arousal in me. It was too many feelings to deal with in too short a time. To go from devastation and jealousy to fear and pity for Johanne, with guilt now coming into it too.</p><p>I had no overwhelming love for Sister Johanne. In my faith, that was another sin against me, I knew. Yet, I still couldn't wish her any harm. Her cries and whispers in the darkness were a particularly haunting sound and I was starting to cry for her now too as I dealt with my agonized tempest of emotions.</p><p>"As much as I <em>love</em> that sound," Mr. Carlson stated, "I don't think it's very good to dance to...and you should really <em>dance</em>, Sister Erin. You've been dancing around the truth for a long time, dancing with other people. And my son, I just know he wants to dance with you. So, let's get some more fitting music going so you two can get to it or else I get down to painting the lovely Sister Johanne's whimple completely red."</p><p>"I can't dance," I whispered, a tear falling down my cheek.</p><p>"Well fake it, for fuck's sake!" the lamb man exclaimed. "That what everybody does these days." Clapping his hands, music began to fill the blackened warehouse. It was heavy with metal guitars and drumming louder than my heart's rythm. "See we'll even take it easy on you and give you some Metallica. Who the fuck can dance to Metallica? 'Of Wolf and Man' should do."</p><p>Instantly, gracefully, the wolf behind me slipped to face me and took my trembling hands in his. While his feet were assured my own were far from it. One of his hands slipped around my waist and he began to twirl me around the room, seeming to know exactly where to step in the space of a night without stars.</p><p>
  <em>"Off through the new day's mist I run</em><br/>
<em>Out from the new day's mist I have come</em><br/>
<em>I hunt, therefore I am, harvest the land</em><br/>
<em>Taking of the fallen lamb..."</em>
</p><p>The unfallen lamb, not like myself, remained in the middle of the room laughing and bleating at his son and his terribly clumsy dance partner.</p><p>"Follow my lead," the wolf whispered in a deep growl, obviously not his authentic voice but not electronic either.</p><p>
  <em>"Bright is the moon, high in starlight</em><br/>
<em>Chill is the air, cold as steel tonight</em><br/>
<em>We shift, call of the wild</em><br/>
<em>Fear in your eyes, it's later than you realized..."</em>
</p><p>"I don't know how," I said softly. Looking finally into the eyes of the man in the wolf mask, I blinked as I painfully realized how much like Kevin's they were, as well. If I hadn't just seen Lomax meeting with the Pope only a few hours ago I could almost believe that I was dancing poorly with the attorney. But it wasn't Kevin Lomax but someone else. Although, thinking it to be a stranger seemed ridiculous granted Mr. Carlson's seeming familiarity with both Johanne and myself.</p><p>"Your body will," my partner bluntly stated in my ear and then increased his moves.</p><p>He was right. My feet naturally bent to his urges and moved where he wanted them to go. Soon we fashioned a dance which was in no way enviable but would suffice.</p><p>
  <em>"Shape shift, nose to the wind</em><br/>
<em>Shape shift, feeling I've been</em><br/>
<em>Move swift, all senses clean</em><br/>
<em>Earth's gift, back to the meaning</em><br/>
<em>Back to the meaning of wolf and man..."</em>
</p><p>"Bravo!" the lamb cried out from his spotlit floor and began to clap. "You're a quick learner. Must keep that in mind...but then you're having a lot of help..." I could feel the wolf's body tensing next to mine as his partner in crime continued his speech. "He <em>likes</em> you," Mr. Carlson stated. "Oh, he doesn't want me to know how much, but a father can always tell when he's paying enough attention. And I'm <em>always</em> paying attention, Sister. That's the only way to win the game."</p><p>I looked into the wolf man's eyes and saw him refusing to look at me.</p><p>"But now I'm tired of all this Fred Astaire bullshit," the lamb remarked in irritation. "I think I need something else to amuse me..."</p><p>The lamb brought his hands together once more and, as the music stopped, I heard the sound of Johanne still crying and whispering. The spotlight shone suddenly on three chairs that seemed to be placed in the center of the room. They were formed in red velvet with gold trims. Embroidered on them were imps similar to the one I had coughed up and then had disappeared. The first one was small in size, like a child's; the middle one was the largest and lorded over the smaller one and the one, a size in between, by its other side.</p><p>"Son, go and take your proper place," the sheep instructed and the wolf immediately stopped the dance. He looked at me almost longingly before he took long strides towards the chair that was the second largest. The light followed him leaving me in the dark listening to Johanne's feverent mourning.</p><p>"It's okay," I called out to her as the spotlight on the lamb disappeared, leaving only the wolf sitting on the chair visible in the darkness. "You're going to be all right, Johanne "</p><p>"Is she?" I heard the electronic voice of Mr. Carlson inquire behind me. "Don't go making promises, Sister Erin. That would be another lie. Of course, if you do as you're told, I won't lay a hand on her pretty little head."</p><p>"What do I do next?" I asked calmly though the tremor in my voice told that it was just another lie.</p><p>"Go to the wolf, little black habit hood," the lamb said.</p><p>I walked instantly to the throne where the wolf was sitting in his suit of red, suddenly looking more like a statue or mannequin for his stillness than an actual living, breathing man. When I was standing before him, I gazed into the dead eyes through the holes in the mask. They looked forward without seeing me and I mouthed three words, hoping that the lamb could not see them with my back turned: "Please help me..."</p><p>"Now, since these last few weeks, you've been busy making a genuine <em>ass</em> of your sweet and pure little self, I think you should take off that pair of pants and underwear you've got under that long, concealing habit, Sister. Then give my son a good view of what you've got back there. Both the front and the back."</p><p>"But I..."</p><p>A scream cut tgrough the darkness, Sister Johanne in obvious pain.</p><p>"YOU WANNA HEAR THAT AGAIN?" Mr. Carlson demanded. "NOW TAKE 'EM OFF!"</p><p>Crying and trying not to think of what had been done to my fellow novice to illicit such a horrible sound, I began to strip from the waist down as had been instructed. It was a humiliating task. One that I could only find the strength to continue by picturing that it was Kevin beneath the mask, viewing it. I kicked the discarded pants and underwear over to my right. "What...what do I do now?"</p><p>"Lift the habit," the father instructed.</p><p>My hands gripped the black cloth and lifted it, finding myself returning to the fantasy that I was doing so for Kevin Lomax, whom was safely in Italy and unaware of my degradation. The wolf's eyes went to my now exposed crotch with the thick patch of hair almost hungrily. I wondered if he could see my arousal, the bit of flesh between my folds responding to my imagination.</p><p>"Play with your clit a bit," came the next order as if my thoughts were easily read in the darkness of the warehouse.</p><p>Crying, my finger went to the bud which became even larger as my finger touched it. I bit my lip from the pleasure that coursed through my lower half, a pressure and small flood of cream caused from my finger toying with the fleshy button.</p><p>"Now turn around and bend over; keep the habit lifted," the lamb told me.</p><p>I spun around and lifted the skirt until it was on my back, the air on the full, round mounds of my ass.</p><p>"Wriggle it around a little while you look at him from over your shoulder."</p><p>I did and turned to see the wolf's appetite growing in his soft brown eyes.</p><p>"Grab your ass...a cheek per each hand...feel them."</p><p>My hands explored my buttocks and I suffered more arousal, my clit throbbing from seeing the wolf becoming aroused, his lap bulging from the show.</p><p>"Now spread those fat cheeks of yours, Sister Erin," Mr. Carlson said with his horrible inhumane laugh. "Show my son what you have behind door number two, so to speak."</p><p>Embarrassed, I pulled the flesh apart until I felt the wind hitting even deeper. Tears were streaming down my face but looking at the wolf I could see that there was no need to feel ashamed. His admiration was displayed fully by his growing erection and the look of lust in the part visible that was fully his own.</p><p>My own sexual bliss grew, seeing the wolf as the man I loved then and not someone that I didn't.</p><p>"Please," I whispered again, wanting him to save me from my own desire and my game of make believe.</p><p>But the wolf would not listen. He rose from his throne of second place splendor and got to his knees behind me. He nuzzled each cheek lovingly before I felt the snout of his mask being placed in my crevice as his hands replaced my own and rubbed my ass.</p><p>"Ohhhh," I whimpered as I felt a tongue suddenly emerge from out of the mask and begin to lick my hole. "No...stop it."</p><p>The wolf's hand, however, slipped forcefully between my legs and listened more to my enflamed vaginal lips and swelling clit than to my mouth and my tongue. He began to feast on me as he played with my genitals. "Stop it...no...no!" I was crying out in my ecstasy before Mr. Carlson's voice overpowered mine.</p><p>"ENOUGH!" the lamb shouted. "Did I raise someone so damn impolite?"</p><p>The wolf took his head out from my ass and slunk back to his throne, leaving me relieved and unsatisfied all at once. I heard the sound of the lamb's footsteps towards me until they stopped a foot infront of my bent over body.</p><p>"Then again, I didn't actually <em>raise</em> you," Mr. Carlson stated and pushed me forcefully backwards and on to his son's lap.</p><p>My ass was still exposed and rubbing against the fabric of the wolf's still insistent and completely hardened dick. His hands grabbed on to me and held my body in place as he thrusted underneath me, the clothed cock pressing close to my asshole but never daring to completely enter it, preferring instead to receive its pleasure from grinding between my fat bottom cheeks.</p><p>"NO!" I cried out but my clit was pounding violently with waves of the blood filling it. The sensation worsened as my attacker found my large breasts and began to clutch them first before eventually tugging on my emerging nipples.</p><p>"No..." my cry of resistence turned to one more of ecstasy and surrender as my pleasure blossomed and grew. I no longer saw the wolf's hands on my breasts but Kevin Lomax's. Under his touch, I pictured that it was him fooling around with my tits while it was <em>his</em> cock full and hard under my ass.</p><p>When one of the hands left my chest to dip between my legs, my thighs separated willingly and let it have entrance while I moaned another half-hearted denial.</p><p>My attacker's finger fondled my bud and I fell to pieces in his lap, still crying my refusal of the pleasure he was giving even as my body moved against his fingertips, trying to help him and fully accepting it.</p><p>"No...No! Please no!" I was panting and crying even through my coming. My butt was spasming around the cock on the verge of entering it but never getting far enough to make it a reality. I felt the member soon doing the same twitching, mad dance, cum oozing through the fabric and generously painting my anus and crack.</p><p>Afterwards, I fell back against the wolf, gasping while he played some more with my bust. I knew that the masked man clearly liked the way he could feel my desparate breathing from them.</p><p>"Now that <em>almost</em> got me off," Mr. Carlson stated. "But not quite. I think we've got us another lesson to teach you, Sister Erin, for your penance. Now with that pretty little mouth that has told so many lies, I think it's only appropriate that we put it to better use. You looked like a fast leaner, after all, as I said."</p><p>The lamb grabbed me in my shamed afterglow from off the wolf's spent lap and threw me to the ground,  on my knees, before him. In crazed imitation of a pet owner, he rubbed my weeping face on his son's wet lap like a dog who had just peed on the carpet. "Did you do that, girl?" he asked. "Bad girl, <em>very</em> bad girl."</p><p>My tears mixed with cum until I felt the wolf's hands on my cheeks, lifting my head up almost protectively again.</p><p>The lamb's hands stiffen on me and then suddenly felt the edge of the blade digging in between my shoulder blades.</p><p>"You give my son the best fucking blow job he's ever fucking had or else I kill you and your fucking sparrow friend. Got that? If he doesn't come inside of your mouth, you're both dead."</p><p>"He...he just CAME!" I shouted out in hopelessness.</p><p>"That's why you've got to make it good, right? You got you're work cut out for you. Consider it charity. My son hasn't been blown for months now. And we'll give you some good music to work by as a time marker. How about the Poppy Family's 'Where Evil Grows?' Is that good enough for a good little Canadian girl such as yourself?"</p><p>"Who <em>are</em> you?" I asked in defiance.</p><p>"No...no time for questions," he stated. "You gotta put that mouth to the task of getting my boy off. Got it? By the end of the song. That's all you got."</p><p>The song started, filling the warehouse with the music of a long since dead group.</p><p>
  <em>"I like the way you smile at me</em><br/>
<em>I felt the heat that enveloped me</em><br/>
<em>And what saw I liked to see</em><br/>
<em>I never knew where evil grew..."</em>
</p><p>My fingers trembled as they went to the fly of the suit before me and I unzipped it. They were still shaking as I pulled out the cock coated in the wolf's cum. The fluid was dripping down it, like wax on the candles I had seen in the cathedral.</p><p>
  <em>"I should have steered away from you</em><br/>
<em>My friend told me to keep clear of you</em><br/>
<em>But something drew me near to you</em><br/>
<em>I never knew where evil grew..."</em>
</p><p>I looked up to see the owner of the organ looking uncomfortable at my touch so soon after his release and I found myself apologizing though I was the one in need of it.</p><p>"Hurry Sister," the lamb urged, pushing the knife a little harder.</p><p>Pretending it was Kevin's cock in my grip, my lips found the bulging tip of the penis and the tip of my tongue tasted the bit of cum pooled in its slitted head. It was my first taste of it and I swallowed instinctively at its taste of copper and salt. My tongue's tasting made the cock in my hand twitch, however, and offered me some hope for victory. I began to gently suckle on it and heard the wolf groan in pleasure from the working of my lips and tongue. The sound almost sounded like the attorney's voice and my clit came back to life too as I felt the wolf's doing the same. Thinking of the organ as belonging to Kevin Lomax,  and hearing his sounds proclaiming that I was doing a well enough job of it, I fell into the act fuller and my mouth grew bolder, remembering the dream I had once had of giving a stone statue head in a cemetery. The man receiving the touch of my mouth, grasped the arms of his throne forcefully and writhed under my ministration.</p><p>Hearing his noises, now lost to the delusion that it was truly Kevin, I found myself lowering my veil. The hair that the attorney adored, fell around my face and on to his balls.</p><p>
  <em>"If I could build a wall around you</em><br/>
<em>I could control the thing that you do..."</em>
</p><p>The wolf moaned as I started to rub my soft curls all around the stiffening shaft and the once more leaking head.</p><p>
  <em>"But I couldn't kill the will within you</em><br/>
<em>And it never shows</em><br/>
<em>The place where evil grows..."</em>
</p><p>"In your mouth!" the lamb warned. "You only get to live if you swallow his cum."</p><p>The words reached me, but it was as if they passed through the wall of my own arousal to finally arrive at my ears. My lips and tongue were enjoying every inch of the phallus they were exploring, everything seeming to throb with need. Every pulsating vein brought my mouth joy as did the taste of it. Thinking I was bringing Kevin Lomax a greater pleasure than his straight haired Italian goddess, I reveled in my sudden discovery of the hidden talent I hopefully possessed.</p><p>"Mmmmm....unh...unh..." the wolf was gasping, squirming and falling apart in his seat of power while I brought him closer to his peak.</p><p>But not quite there yet.</p><p>"Songs almost over," the lamb stated. "It was nice knowing you."</p><p>
  <em>"She used to do this little thing that always made me come. Some little trick with her tongue that would make my balls tighten and me shoot off inside of her mouth before I'd know it."</em>
</p><p>Kevin's words returned and I tried to learn the secrets of a dead woman's tongue. Suddenly with one quick slow movement, when my moist and bristled appendage moved around the tip of the cock in some new and unusual way, the wolf howled in ecstasy and instantly shot off inside of my mouth.</p><p>
  <em>"Evil grows in the dark</em><br/>
<em>Where the sun, it never shines..."</em>
</p><p>Cum flooded my cheeks and fell down my throat like a waterfall of sperm. It felt hot and delicious as it slipped down and I kept my lips wrapped around the spilling member, swallowing its offering until his climax was over.</p><p>
  <em>"Evil grows in cracks and holes</em><br/>
<em>And lives in people's minds..."</em>
</p><p>In my head, it was Kevin giving me a feeding of his seed and I did not desire it to go to waste.</p><p>
  <em>"Evil grew, it's part of you..."</em>
</p><p>Only when I gently pulled my head back, aware again of the blade in my back, did some escape from my lips and fall on to my whimple.</p><p>
  <em>"And now it seems to be..."</em>
</p><p>With this crude raindrop, I looked up at the wolf staring at me with his satisfaction and lust in his brown eyes. They were dazed but obviously lost in a sexual joy and how I wished then that it was Kevin I had left with such a pleasured expression.</p><p>
  <em>"That everytime I look at you</em><br/>
<em>Evil grows in me."</em>
</p><p>My eyes locked with that of the wolf, the song ended and I failed to realize, when it did, that I could no longer hear Sister Johanne crying.</p><p>"Not bad," the lamb stated. My turn."</p><p>Without having forseen it, the sheep pulled me to my feet, once again as if I weighed nothing, and turned me to face him. He kissed me harshly and I found the unpleasant taste of latex entering my mouth alongside his son's cum, some of which became smeared on the muzzle of the lamb.</p><p>"NO!" the wolf screamed, instantly rising to his feet behind us.</p><p>His strong arms gripped  me once more and pulled me out of his father's embrace. The wolf struck the lamb and grabbed the knife from out of its hand. Grasping out to regain it, the senior Carlson only managed to lay hold of the blade and cut himself in the process. The blood went flying as he whipped his hand back in the flash of resulting pain. A drop of it landed next to the cum on my whimple and I fell to the floor in an attempt to avoid the fight that began between father and son, lamb and wolf.</p><p>I watched the ensuing battle, the spotlight showing that though the lamb was the prey and supposendly weaker it was not true this time around.</p><p>Or perhaps the masks lied too.</p><p>My eyes took in the sight of the warehouse as the spotlight went everywhere, no longer insisting on following only the men or where the lamb ordered it to go. When it landed on Johanne's cage, I began to scream. The nun was looking at me with lifeless eyes, blood dripping from her mouth. Her death had been by her own choice, or so it seemed. The nun had impaled herself on the spikes inside her own cage.</p><p>Crying, I began to sob as the spotlight landed on the door which we had entered for our cursed meeting. I rose to my feet and began to run to it as the wolf and lamb continued their war.</p><p>My hand landing on the doorknob,</p><p>I turned it and</p><p>stepped</p><p>into</p><p>the</p><p>corridor.</p><p>Where I quickly met Sister Johanne.</p><p>She was standing there with a look of impatience in her once more life filled blue eyes..</p><p>"Well, was there anyone inside?" she asked me.</p><p>My mouth fell open and I stood in the warehouse's empty hallway, free of the colors of red, orange and yellow and from the alabaster statues with their large imposing erections.</p><p>"I...I..." I brought a hand to my head and found my veil raised once more.</p><p>"Sister Erin," the very much back to her usual condescending self nun asked. "Was there anyone in there or should we tell the Reverend Motg6er that it was only a hoax?"</p><p>Feeling the world shifting beneath me, I spun around and opened the door behind. Expecting to see either whom had won the fight between father and son, or to see them still in the process leading to an outcome, I was in shock when all that meeted my eyes was a humongous room filled with large boxes. Even the three thrones were gone and in their place stood only a desk, ordinary and cluttered.</p><p>Johanne brushed past me. "Nothing," she said. "Some people have cruel senses of humor. But what took you thirty minutes to find <em>that</em> out reveals your intelligence as much as theirs,  as far as I am concerned."</p><p>She burst past me again and into the corridor.</p><p>"Come on," she stated. "There's a payphone two buildings down. I saw it on the way here. We can call a taxi to take us back to the Abbey there."</p><p>Holding myself, I watched her go and sobbed only once after she had walked through the door, before rushing to catch up.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Back at the Abbey, Sister Johanne insisted on telling the Reverend Mother personally about the trick and sent me to my room to get some sleep. "You look horrible and frazzled," she criticized. "Get some rest. You're falling apart, Sister Erin."</p><p>Indeed she was right. As I stumbled back to my room, I clung to the wall for support.</p><p>Inside the safety of my room, I fell apart further and began to wail but very lowly as not to be overheard. I was going crazy. There was no doubt left.</p><p>Only as my hand made its way to wipe my face free of tears, it accidentally brushed against my whimple and felt something hard. Looking down, I saw two bits of bodily fluid lying on the white: the bit of blood from the lamb and the drop of cum from the wolf. They were as clear as day and without a hint of illusion. Crying once again, but this time in manic relief, I smiled with insanity over the fact that a nightmare had the chance of being real.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>Well, I had my sleep test on Saturday night.</p><p>And it was worse than I thought it would be. :/</p><p>I was so embarrassed. Being shy, having 26 electrodes placed all over my body by a stranger wasn't exactly fun. And I kept feeling hopelessly awkward and stupid.</p><p>I also kept having to pee. Doing so without the wires falling into the toilet was tricky. And then the second time I had to go, I was so happy that they didn't fall in only to be walking out the washroom door and to have one wire get stuck on it and fall off of my face. :/</p><p>Returning to my bed, the attendant checked another electrode on me to make sure it was on right because she said she was getting wicked signals from it! :O</p><p>It took me forever to fall asleep. How do you get comfortable with 26 wires attached to your body? And my pillow was so soft all the foam was squashed to the side making me feel like my head was on nothing.</p><p>And...remember my fear that I'd fart?</p><p>...</p><p>I did.</p><p>And even worse yet, I was just falling asleep and it woke me up! :O :/ </p><p>Anyway, I'm glad I won't be doing that anytime soon again. And I thank God that I did manage to fall asleep eventually.</p><p>Without anymore farts to wake me up. :/</p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Confession is Good for the Soul</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>When Kevin returns from Italy, I find myself confessing to him what happened at the warehouse. But as he presses me to make charges, it leads to a disturbing revelation...</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Next update should be on Wednesday. :D &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I cut the stained piece of my whimple off. My past experience with the imp had taught me that my room was not secure, just as the bit of contrasting fluids had shown me that not everything was in my mind, as I had feared. I folded the cloth several times, to prevent the blood and seed from the two men touching my skin, and placed it inside of my bra. The thought of it being so close was not comforting but I had experienced enough nightmares to help keep sleep far away that night.</p><p>Whenever I closed my eyes, the only blackness I saw was that of the horrible warehouse room, always featuring a spotlight with either a lamb or wolf at its heart. Occassionally, I saw Johanne's dead and bloodied body impaled inside of her cage and I wept and wailed, hating this image above all the others. At other times, I found myself dizzy and feeling as if I were being spun around still by the wolf and his assured and graceful feet. Sometimes, his hands and mouth were on me, bringing me unwanted pleasure, or my face was buried in his lap with my lips wrapped around his cock.</p><p>I was becoming aroused again with the images while they left me conflicted with horror. I had done what I had done to help Johanne survive and myself as well. But my body had not known that, especially when it was so easy to believe without seeing the man's face that it was Kevin doing everything to me and making me do it to him too. The resulting pleasure sweeping through my body made me feel ashamed and guilty; while, at the same time, the pleasant throbbing between my legs reminded me of all I had given up when I had made my vows to God.</p><p>Tossing and turning all night,  in a similar war between horror and ecstasy, I heard the first sounds of morning coming in through the old bricks of the Abbey while I saw the first rays of sun peering in through similarly ancient glass. However the sun brought me no more comfort than the moon and my soul remained calling out to God to help me understand and to forgive me as well.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Johanne was not at breakfast. Looking at the faces of the other nuns, I did not see her pinched and judgemental gaze and I found myself missing it for the first time since I had come to the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. Her absence did not go unnoticed by her friends and by the time they began to talk amongst themselves, Sister Beatrice appeared with her kind face once more warped in worry.</p><p>"You may have noticed that Sister Johanne is not with us," she informed, standing at the head of the table. "The Reverend Mother thought that I should inform you all that she was called back to her hometown in Trenton because her grandfather has passed. She will be back but she is helping her mother and father through this horrible ordeal. Please offer her and her family your prayers today."</p><p>Studying the faces of my fellow novices, thinking of the sudden disclosure that Johanne came from New Jersey, something she had never mentioned before, I suddenly realized that I did not know the lives of the women whom surrounded me very deeply. They kept their pasts to themselves just as I realized I had kept mine, other than my conversion. It seemed to me then that the thick construct of brick and mortor were not the only walls that existed in the Abbey. We each kept our pasts to ourselves and felt little motivation to share personal secrets.</p><p>It was a fact which unnerved me.</p><p>But not as much as Johanne's vacant seat did.</p><p>My eyes repeatedly fell on it and I could not believe that the highly critical nun was grieving with her family in Trenton. Part of me still saw her in a warehouse in New York, her mouth wide in a scream that I had not heard and her eyes opened in terror as she wept bloody tears.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Two days later, as I struggled with my memories of Mr. Carlson and his son and what to do with the swatch of dirty cloth at my breast, the Reverend Mother called me to her office.</p><p>"Mr. Lomax has returned from Italy, Sister Erin,  and he has requested to meet with you at his office today at three," she said, sitting in her chair and looking at me smugly. "Milton finally learned of Alice Lomax's coma and told the young lawyer about it instantly. It seems that some wires were crossed...something was lost in translation. Perfectly understandable."</p><p>"And Kevin is back in New York?" I inquired. "He's not in Florida with his mom?"</p><p>"Mr. Lomax went there immediately, as soon as he arrived back in the country, yesterday," the woman glared at me. "Knowing there was little he could do that wasn't being handled already, he came back here. A highly <em>sensible</em> move. His mother is in <em>God's</em> hands now."</p><p>I gave a small nod as the superior nun continued to turn her harsh gaze on me.</p><p>Suddenly the memory of the last time I had seen Johanne returned and I decided to question her of it, trying to convince myself that I hadn't truly left the poor nun dead inside a cage in a warehouse somewhere close to the docks. "Did Johanne tell you about what happened the other night?" I asked.</p><p>"Yes," the Reverend Mother said, raising her head. "A sin: to lie and make us waste money we could have used on the poor. Like buying a child a <em>toy</em> they don't need."</p><p>I flinched, recalling the teddy bear I had bought for the boy at Kennedy Airport. "Have you heard from Johanne at all?" I inquired further. "I know you two were very close."</p><p>"Of course, I have heard from my little sparrow," the Reverend Mother  said and looked slightly angry at herself for the betrayed intimacy.</p><p>In my mind, I saw a lamb calling the absent nun that same endearment and the subsequent look of surprise on Johanne's face from hearing it.</p><p>"She's doing quite well, or as well as can be expected," she said. "Grief is always like that. We simply survive it."</p><p>I thought of Kevin Lomax and his loss of Mary Ann. I thought the nightmare inside of the warehouse with the father and son and how I too was trying to survive following the incident and barely managing. It would be good again to see Lomax again, I knew. He had had nothing to do with what had happened to me, after all, being thousands of miles away and most likely in the arms of his date. While the end of that musing brought me little joy, the fact that Kevin Lomax was back and that I would be seeing him shortly did and I left the Reverend Mother's office feeling somewhat more comforted than when I had entered it.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Kevin Lomax was clearly distraught; I could tell that the moment that I entered his office at Milton, Chadwick and Waters. While he greeted me with the same affection, I soon watched from my usual place on the still unsettling couch while the man began to pace back and forth across the floor behind his desk and in front of the large window, rubbing his face and telling me about the rushed trip back to see his mother.</p><p>"How is she?" I asked, ommitting the part about how she had contacted me the night before her illness.</p><p>"She's surviving...<em>barely</em>. They said that the venom isn't recognizable...that if they could find the snake that would help. But, damnit, they ain't ever going to find it! IT'S FLORIDA FOR FUCK'S SAKE!"</p><p>His accent was becoming more pronounced the more his rage was showing. Though he sometimes tried to soften it so he wouldn't look like a country mouse whom had merely stumbled his way into the big city, his mother's sickness had caused him to readopt it fully. And to become, in a way, closer to the son he had been when a Bible thumping fundamentalist known as Alice Lomax had raised him on her own in a backwoods Florida town. It was a natural instinct, I understood; the reversion to how his mother, whom was dominating his thoughts, had seen him.</p><p>"He didn't tell me...my own mother and he didn't tell me!" Kevin said becoming more angry.</p><p>"John Milton? So there wasn't some mix up or problem with the messages?" I asked.</p><p>The attorney shook his head violently. He stopped his pacing and placed his palms on his already back to being cluttered desk. "Absolutely not. The bastard knew the moment he urged me to step onto the fucking plane with him! He just didn't want it to spoil the trip."</p><p>Kevin became silent and I saw the sharp line of his shoulders trembling in rage. Suddenly his hands flew across the surface of the desk, spilling everything onto the floor in his fury. "I HATE HIM!!! I HATE THE BASTARD! WHY DOES HE ALWAYS HAVE TO WIN? WHY CAN'T I EVER FUCKING BEAT HIM???"</p><p>He screamed then, a deep and primal sound,still a wounded child but also a man now whom had days of stored up frustration, rage and sorrow inside of him. Seeing his pain, studying the humanity betrayed on his suddenly vulnerable and contorted face, I once again knew how much I loved him and the knowledge was another knife into both my soul and my heart. Now there wasn't only guilt and a feeling of having betrayed my God but also a feeling that after coming in the wolf's lap and placing his cock within my mouth I had betrayed the human man I loved, as well.</p><p>There were too many emotions inside of the room, both Lomax's and mine, and I found my face twisting in its own sympathetic and selfish agony.</p><p>Kevin turned to see me, as I held myself on his couch and began rocking back and forth. "Erin..." he said, suddenly repentant. "I'm sorry. I was just upset..."</p><p>I started to weep, voicing more of the pain I had been suffering and keeping trapped inside of me like Johanne in her spikey cage.</p><p>The lawyer rushed to the couch and sat down beside me, placing his hand on my shoulder. It felt so much like the son of Mr. Carlson's had resting there that my cries grew louder and my rocking more frantic.</p><p>"Shhh...shhh..." he whispered soothingly, taking me in his arms and holding me so that I need not do all the work by myself. "What is it? What's wrong?"</p><p>"Kevin...I was...I was...I was assaulted two nights ago," I confessed. "Or forced...forced to..."</p><p>I wailed then, turning to his shoulder and making the cloth there damp with my tears, spit and snot. I could feel the man tensing at my words while he continued to stroke my face. "Where did it happen? Did you know the guy?" he asked, calmly and yet strangely dead sounding.</p><p>Shaking my head, I answered, "The Abbey got a call from a woman saying she had lost her husband and her family wanted counseling...like what I'm doing with you. Only when Sister Johanne and I arrived at the address, it was a warehouse by the docks...there were two men: one in a sheep mask, the other in a wolf one. The sheep claimed they were father and son. He had me do things to his son...he said he'd kill Johanne and me if I didn't."</p><p>"What thi...," Kevin started to ask but then stopped himself, shaking his own head at the question he knew would only embarrass me. "Is Johanne okay?"</p><p>The question made me feel shaken and unsure. Although I had seen her afterwards,  I still couldn't get the image of her corpse out of my mind. I didn't know how to answer so only replied as honestly as I could. "I don't know..."</p><p>Releasing me from his arms, he grabbed my shoulders and looked into my wet eyes. "If we could find the bastards would you and Johanne be willing to testify against them, Erin?"</p><p>This question now not only made me feel confused but outright terrified. Having to confess what had happened to me outloud and in front of others was almost a horror equal to what I had already survived and escaped. It would not only place me back in the moment but force me to do so in the fear of what others would think of me then. And I was too frightened to tell Kevin that Johanne had acted like it hadn't happened at all.</p><p>Seeing my fear, Kevin softened. "You don't have to answer. We'll find them first and worry about that afterwards. Where was the warehouse? Maybe we could find some evidence left behind and get lucky."</p><p>My tongue offered the address clumsily as my hand reached under my habit and Kevin looked on in confusion. "I have this too," I whispered and my friend looked in shock down at the piece of cloth I had removed from my bra and was unfolding. "The two of them started fighting when the lamb wanted me too...the blood is his. The cum...the cum belongs to the wolf."</p><p>At that last confession, Kevin took the swatch of the whimple out of my hand. "I'll have a friend at the station run this through the lab there. Maybe they'll have something on file."</p><p>I looked up at him, my eyes displaying my terror. He took my face in his hands. "Don't worry," he soothed. "We won't do <em>anything</em> about it. Not unless you want to."</p><p>A little grateful smile claimed my lips then and I saw at its appearance Kevin's own expression become more saddened. His thumb began to caress my cheek. "To think of anyone hurting you...John's right about that,  at least...there are too many people whom exist only to hurt others...it's hard to believe that we are God's special creatures."</p><p>His eyes were filled with so much torment that they appeared darker than I had ever seen them before. Perhaps it was because I was still a nun and offering him counseling, or maybe it was only because I loved him as much as I did, but my hand clasped over his and I whispered, "We're not. But that's why, when you find one that is, you know how special they are."</p><p>Kevin stared at me intensely, and though when he held me again the guilt and shame were still there, I closed my eyes and turned my head away from it so I could find the longed for comfort in his arms.</p><p>* * *</p><p>The next time I saw Kevin he ushered me into the office himself. There was a concerned and preoccupied look on his face. My first thought was that something had happened to his mother but when I asked about her, from the privacy of the office, he only shook his head. "No, I'm more worried about telling you that I needed to get Milton's help on this...on what happened to you."</p><p>My stomach sank and I felt as if I was about to become ill. Knowing that John Milton knew about my assault was almost as bad as thinking about a courtroom full of strangers hearing about it. "You should have asked me first, Kevin," I managed to whisper.</p><p>"I know but his connections are stronger than mine."</p><p>Blinking away tears, I bit my bottom lip. I wanted to ask Lomax if it was because the man was his father, and that particular <em>connection</em>, that he felt so simultaneously repulsed and attracted to John Milton. But that would have once again led to mentioning Alice's phone call,  which still left me feeling anxious and as if secrecy was necessary to protect the woman.</p><p>Seeing my torn expression, Kevin quickly added, "And I think we got something."</p><p>He took my hand and led me to the table where he opened a file and placed it in front of me. "The DNA samples from the fluids led us to these two men," the attorney stated, placing two mug shots in front of me. They were of two white males, one definitely shorter than the other but both of around the same age of thirty; both were white and both possessed brown eyes. The short man was one Gerald Toomey and the taller a Henry Warwick. I looked at their faces, the short one being blond and the taller one with light brown hair the color of chocolate, and tried to see something familiar or feel some emotion related to repugnance. Instead, all I was looking at were two strangers and all which I suffered was indifference, as if I had never even encountered them before.</p><p>"Do they look familiar?" he asked.</p><p>"No...but they were in masks," I mumbled, staring at the taller of the two and trying to picture his face in the wolf's mask.</p><p>And his hands upon my body.</p><p>"Did you find anything at the warehouse?" I asked.</p><p>Kevin studied me intensely and shook his head. "Nothing. But it is in these two men's names. They went to college together; started a successful business out of that same building. In fact they were represented by MCW on charges of extortion a few weeks back. It wasn't my case but..."</p><p>"You think they saw me here?" I asked. "Is that how they knew things?"</p><p>Regret and apology flashed in his eyes. "It's likely...if it is, I'm sorry Erin. I got you into this painful mess."</p><p>"Why me?" I asked plaintively. "I didn't hurt them."</p><p>"They're strongly anti-religious," Kevin stated. "They have a history of vandalizing churches in their high school years. Look, Erin..." Kevin said returning to his previous remorse. "I feel just horrible. John said if you decide to file charges he'll allow me to help guide you through it."</p><p>"Like I am guiding you?" I asked again, glancing down at the photo of the man whom allegedly had worn the mask of the predator.</p><p>"Yes," Kevin answered. "It's the least I can do."</p><p>I gazed back at the widower and blinked; his eyes seemed far closer than the stranger's to my attacker, I thought in fear and unwilled excitement. "Can, I think about it?" I asked in a daze, holding his stare.</p><p>"Yes," Kevin replied. "But not too long. These things turn out better the fresher they are. It will help you out better in the long run."</p><p>Another few blinks before I gazed back at Henry Warwick. It was odd but I felt far more safe looking into his blank, mundane eyes than I did into Kevin Lomax's haunting ones.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Later in the evening, thinking about the case, I used the phone in the study to call the man that I loved at his home. The room in the Abbey was vacant, and Kevin had given me a card with the numbers of where I could reach him. I was grateful when he picked up and not some woman; I had never contacted him during his life away from his work and feared that I would interrupt him during something intimate or something else I did not want to think of. He was grieving but he was also a man. Men had a way of distinguishing between sex and love, the body and the heart. He could give the formers in both equations to some conquest and reassure himself that he had not cheated on his beloved Mare because he had not given the latters to anyone but her.</p><p>"Erin?" Kevin said and I was amazed he knew whom was calling him until I realized that he probably had the technology to identify where the call was coming from. Being a lawyer for both sides during his career, the man had probably made quite a few enemies and it was probably better to be safe and not sorry.</p><p>"Kevin," I said. "I want you to talk me through what would happen, tomorrow, if I decided to press charges...just so I'd know. I couldn't live with myself if they did something like that to someone else...but...I want to know first what it would be like."</p><p>"Okay...only if you're sure. It might not be easy."</p><p>"I'm sure," I confirmed as my eyes landed on the TV in the study. My thoughts turned to another thought entirely and the concern before the traumatic event with the lamb and the wolf. "Kevin...who was that girl you were with...the one at the..."</p><p>"Her?" Kevin said with a humorless laugh. "Some girl John told me to take. She was really his but said we'd look better on film together. So, did we?"</p><p>"Yes," I said, a tear rolling down my cheek. "You did."</p><p>There was silence, except if you were to count the lawyer's deep breathing, before he broke it by confessing, "It would have been better if it was you...I wish it had been you, Erin."</p><p>I was so close to telling him that I wished that it had been me too but he hung up before the words could slip from my tongue, across the wire and to his ears.</p><p>* * *</p><p>"How is the counseling going?" the Reverend Mother asked as I was heading out the door to walk to Milton, Chadwick and Waters.</p><p>I thought the question over for a moment. My experience in the warehouse had made me reluctant to lie. I needed to think of a reply which was truthful enough. "Kevin is troubled by the situation with his mother. We don't talk about Mary Ann Lomax much these days."</p><p>"Well, in any way we can be of service," she returned. "Within the <em>proper</em> context."</p><p>"How is Sister Johanne?" I inquired.</p><p>"Fine," the older woman stated coldly. "She should be back in a matter of days."</p><p>"Good," I said. I offered her a nod before crossing the Abbey's threshold, grateful to be out of the woman's always intimidating company.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Although, I had escaped the Reverend Mother, I found the time spent with Kevin equally distressing. The court procedures and what the police would need from me was frightening. It seemed a sin to have made someone whom had already suffered be put through something almost as harrowing.</p><p>To make matters worse, the whole time I was fully aware that Johanne acting as if none of it had happened would make me look like a liar or a psychotic. If she had been pretending to ignore her own emotional turmoil, it was the finest act of self deception I had ever personally seen.</p><p>Another fear was that my own failure not to confess the crime to anybody else would also look bad.</p><p>By the end of the meeting, I was convinced that letting the matter go was all that I could do.</p><p>Then John Milton walked through the door and changed everything by his unwanted appearance.</p><p>"Kevin, do you have the preliminaries on the..."</p><p>The owner of the firm stated until he took in the fact that his best lawyer was talking to someone and whom that person was.</p><p>My face burned red hot, like petals on a flower, as I realized what the man's thoughts would be as he saw me. It was the first time we had been in the same room since Kevin had told him what had happened. The older man turned and faced me in the chair I was sitting while Kevin sat to my right on the end of the leather couch.</p><p>"Sister Erin," Milton said, holding his hands infront of himself. "May I tell you how truly sorry I am to hear of your rape."</p><p>Kevin stood and I felt sick. "John..." he said in warning.</p><p>"Come on, Kevin," Milton said. "You're prepping her, aren't you? If she prosecutes the defense will be far tougher on her than just that. We both know that's a fact."</p><p>"I wasn't raped," I said after a deep breath. "They...he..."</p><p>Both men looked down at me and my cheeks burned brighter still.</p><p>"Have you been over this with her yet?" John Milton asked.</p><p>"No," Kevin replied. "But..."</p><p>"Fuck...that's the worst part, Kev," the older man cursed in awe. "You put her through that first and see if she can still take it. Here...let me do it; let me play Devil's advocate for a change with your dear little sister."</p><p>Swallowing harshly, I watched Milton walk to the shelf and grab a familiar black book hidden at the far end, one that I had never noticed sitting there before. He brought it to me and placed my shaking hand on top of it. "Do you, Sister Erin, promise to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you <em>God</em>?"</p><p>"But..." I said, looking to Kevin.</p><p>"No, Sister a butt is what you're sitting on...did you let them have that?"</p><p>"STOP IT, JOHN!" Kevin shouted in outrage.</p><p>I looked at my trembling hand still resting on the Holy Bible. "No...yes," I said, compelled to tell the truth ever since that night and my penance. "The lamb...he made me take off my pants and show my b-b-butt to the w-wolf. Then the wolf...he...he placed his h-head in...he licked me there."</p><p>"You don't have to, Erin," Kevin whispered.</p><p>"No," I answered glancing up at my friend. "Mr. Milton is right...this is what I am ashamed of most. I've avoided it. If I face it maybe, I'll know..."</p><p>We stared at each other until I could no longer hold his gaze and continue. So, I looked away.</p><p>"Did you like it?" Milton asked.</p><p>"Yes," I replied.</p><p>"What did he do next?"</p><p>I closed my eyes. "The lamb pushed me into the lap of the wolf...the wolf he started to touch me...his hands touched my breasts through the habit...but when they found my clitoris...I had no underwear on so it...it..."</p><p>"And did you like that too?"</p><p>"Yes," I said sadly.</p><p>"Was this your first time?"</p><p>"John you know that wouldn't be admi..."</p><p>"Yes," I interrupted Kevin Lomax's protest. "I'd never been touched like that before..."</p><p>"Interesting," John Milton commented. "You're a virgin. So, since you're under oath, Sister, do you really believe in God?"</p><p>"Yes, yes I do."</p><p>"Always?"</p><p>"No. Sometimes it's so quiet I doubt..."</p><p>I choked on a sob, not feeling that God was with me now either.</p><p>"So, what happened after him touching you there? Did you come?"</p><p>"Yes," I replied again, too ashamed to turn and look in Kevin Lomax's direction.</p><p>"Did your assailant come as well?"</p><p>"Yes...I felt it wet and warm against my buttocks."</p><p>"Did that get you hot?"</p><p>I nodded.</p><p>"So the court can hear, Sister."</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>"What then?"</p><p>I took another deep breath and continued. "The lamb turned the knife on me. He forced me on to my knees and forced my head into the wolf's spent lap..he...he said if I didn't make him come again, inside of my mouth, that he'd kill Sister Johanne and myself..."</p><p>Tears stung my eyes as I remembered the feel of the steel pressing into my back, as if the lamb possessed a knife for an erection.</p><p>"Did you make this wolf come?"</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>"What did it feel like: the wolf's cock and his cum?"</p><p>I expected Kevin to protest again but all that I heard was his own deep and laboured breathing. "It felt like heaven on my tongue...smoother than I thought...like God had fashioned his cock from velvet...I loved the way my tongue could wrap around it...the way that I tasted the cum already coating it...that and the freshly leaking precum..."</p><p>I was crying desperately then in shameful truthful memory.</p><p>"And when he ejaculated? What was that like?"</p><p>I wept more violently. "It spilled down my throat and I welcomed it...it was warm and tasted like...like salt and flour...I was proud I had done it. I swallowed his seed and felt blessed."</p><p>"And was it the wolf's cum that you swallowed? Was it his cock that you pictured inside your mouth, Sister Erin?"</p><p>"NO! NO!" I shouted. "IT WASN'T HIS! IT WAS KEVIN'S COCK...KEVIN'S SEED...I KEPT WISHING, PRAYING THAT IT WAS KEVIN'S! I WANTED IT TO BE KEVIN'S!"</p><p>I wailed then with the horrible truth of it. What I had not wanted to ever confess to anyone. Tears still falling as violently down my cheeks as the fluid had fallen from my assailant's penis, I added something more then to my painful, embarrassing confession.</p><p>"I made myself believe it was you, Kevin Lomax. That was how I did it. I wiped my hair all over that cock and I sucked on it in delight...but it would have been better if it was you...I wished that it was <em>you</em>, Kevin."</p><p>No words were spoken in reply and my heart broke.</p><p>Finally I found the strength in his ensuing silence to turn and look in Lomax's direction. On the man's handsome tortured face, I saw an expression I had not expected to see. On his features was written, pain and pleasure, sadness and joy, but above all others, there was a look of extreme sexual bliss. My words had aroused and excited him. His eyes were so much like the eyes behind the holes of the wolf mask that I trembled and exhaled sharply. Something close to my face caught my attention and my eyes travelled down the length of his body until they saw in shock, horror and desirous gratitude the phallus sticking out from Kevin Lomax's lowered fly.</p><p>Then I realized that it had not been only my words that had made the man hard.</p><p>It was his memory as well.</p><p>Staring at the reddened, swollen piece of flesh belonging to the attorney, I realized that I knew every inch of it, every vein and curve. My tongue could trace them in my sleep. In fact, often, I had awakened making my pillow wet doing just that.The cock was as burned into my memory as were the Devil Paintbrushes that grew around my house during my childhood.</p><p>Gazing back into Kevin's still carnally longing face, our eyes were held together as much as our bodies had been while we had danced inside the hellish warehouse.</p><p>"Be careful what you wish for, Sister Erin," John Milton's voice stated, interrupting the contest of stares I was engaged in with his son. His voice was garbled, as if spoken though rubber, and when I turned to look at him, I saw only a familar looking lamb staring back at me. "You just might have gotten it without ever knowing."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>I watched Manhunter last night. </p><p>Having OCD, I feel like Will Graham. He has thoughts he doesn't want but can't get rid of. I think it's the bad side of being empathetic and creative. You can see things from every angle, see every possibility and not all of those are pleasant or something that you want. So having them in your head and not being able to turn that creativity or empathy off turns a blessing into a curse.</p><p>I always remember that saying that when your leg is broken you stop using it so it can heal. Voila! Easy. But when it's your brain...You can't turn it off. It's what helps enable you to keep going.</p><p>But a brain *isn't* a person. It can be conditioned; it can be wrong. And the fact that I have all of these unwanted thoughts inside of it makes me know further that I have a soul.</p><p>But that doesn't make it any easier.</p><p>I've gotta keep looking at my brain as being like a room. People can come and go into it but there is only one owner: me</p><p>There's a scene towards the end of Manhunter, where Joan Allen's character asks Will, "Who are you?"</p><p>He replies, "I'm Graham; Will Graham."</p><p>There is so much triumph in that scene because he knows who he is, at last.</p><p>With empathy or OCD that's hard. *You* get buried under so many false thoughts or other people's ones or feelings. You just keep hoping for thoughts that are your own. And when those happen, it is one of the most beautiful feelings in the world.</p><p>Then you know how good it is just to be yourself; how it is one of the greatest gifts God can ever give you.</p><p>Much love;<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. In Hallowed Halls, One All Hallows' Eve</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>John Milton tries to coax me into abandoning my vows while Kevin Lomax eagerly hopes that I will, for both our sakes.</p><p>Meanwhile, Sister Johanne returns to the Abbey.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I looked back to Kevin and his swollen cock, my mouth wanting to wrap around it, as my cunt twitched in a hunger for it too, before I looked up into his face. One tear fell from my eye and it rolled leisurely down my cheek,  which suddenly felt bereft of all color. At the sight of that tear, Kevin's lust faltered for a second and he seemed to look at me in sadness.</p><p>"How?" I asked. "I saw you in Italy. There's no possible way."</p><p>"I thought with faith all things were possible," Lomax softly countered in a voice thick with arousal, though his eyes remained sorrowful.</p><p>"Look, Sister, we aren't the ones on trial here," John Milton stated, tearing the lamb mask off and throwing it onto black leather. "We can keep our secrets to ourselves. You, on the otherhand, are still under oath."</p><p>"She never swore anything," Kevin reminded. His right hand found my left cheek and cupping it he stared down into my eyes, tracing the track of the teardrop with his thumb.</p><p>"Who cares; it's all in her heart, anyway," John Milton argued. "She thinks just from touching that black covered rag that she promised her God that she'll be tell the truth. She's more honest than any of the wonderful liars you've helped get free. And I thank them and myself for that fact."</p><p>"Why?" I asked Kevin Lomax, my voice low, hoping that his father would not overhear. "Why did you do that to me?"</p><p>But it was a vain hope.</p><p>"Why? Why? Another fuckin' question!" Milton exclaimed. "I'll answer that one for you though...because my boy <em>likes</em> you. He honestly has a soft spot for you, Sister Erin. Just like<em> 'Mr. Carlson'</em> told you in that warehouse."</p><p>I was still gazing in overwhelmed shock at my friend, but could see John Milton walking over to the desk at the other end of the room. Gracefully, smoothly,  with a spin and a lift, he sat on it and then folded his hands on his lap. "Question is what are we gonna do about it?"</p><p>"You forced me to..." I ripped my eyes away from Kevin and felt as if I were tearing my heart into two in the act. "You terrified me, threatened me and..."</p><p>"And you enjoyed every second of the sex stuff when you could pretend it was little, old Kevin here," John Milton interjected. "You just confessed that. So, what? You got your wish. What are you complaining about?"</p><p>I could not vocalize my outrage, horror and shame; it stuck in my throat and chocked back such simple things as words and air. The fact that Johanne had been threatened and they had tricked me into thinking that she had died stood as the greatest of the sins which they had forced me to live through. Then came the days of anger at myself and guilt for fearing that I had betrayed my God and the man that I loved, whom turned out to be my attacker. Shame was born from the almost deliriously happy realization that it had been Kevin's hands all over my body, his face buried within my buttocks and tasting me, his fingers exploring between my folds and his cock spraying its cum and coating my ass even through his trousers.</p><p>It had been Kevin Lomax's cock filling my mouth.</p><p>And I had wanted that desperately, I knew.</p><p>My eyes drifted over to the couch and the memory fully returned of the attorney's violation of me there. I saw him marking my breasts with his teeth and his exploration of every inch of them with his tongue and his lips. I turned to the window and regained the memory of his tasting of me. And although we were far from it then in his office at the firm of Milton, Chadwick and Waters, my lips burned with the recollection of a ravenous kiss stolen by Lomax in front of his wife's grave at Trinity Cemetery.</p><p>"You've been having me all this time," I said softly and in agony. "Whenever you wanted to. And then you made me forget...How? Drugs?"</p><p>Kevin still eyed me penitently but his face now also appeared to be steeling itself against my wounded accusation. When we heard John Milton erupt in a single long blast of laughter, both Lomax and I turned to stare at him. He was swinging his feet back and forth in wild amusement from his perch on the edge of the desk, his face almost demonic. "Drugs? That's a good one. Drugs?"</p><p>"What then?" I demanded.</p><p>He waved a finger at me then, as if he were a teacher and I his pupil, asking some stupid and pointless inquiry. "Trade secrets. We can't divulge it. Confidentiality and all of that bullshit. But don't worry, Sister; he might have done quite a few things to you...preparing you so to speak...getting your body used to the idea of it all despite that God loving soul inside of you...but he never did that one thing...that <em>one</em> thing he was waiting for your consent to take."</p><p>"But the warehouse," I looked up at the attorney again.</p><p>"Well, Kevin <em>is</em> only human, after all," John answered for his son. "Who can blame him if he needed to be touched for a change. He was doing all the work beforehand, you gotta concede."</p><p>These words above all others enraged Kevin and I saw him turn in anger to glare at his boss before kneeling before me and placing gentle hands on my shaking knees. The touch, made to offer some form of comfort, only rushed straight to my clit and eagerly responsive vagina. It clenched in want and need and I knew that Milton's words were true: My body had been conditioned over weeks to desire Kevin Lomax's touch and it wanted to know both his hands and mouth again.</p><p>"Let me go!" I cried in pain but Kevin grabbed my shoulders and held me back fiercely in the chair. "HELP! OH, PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME!" I cried out loudly, in desperation. "PLEASE!"</p><p>I continued to scream, knowing that even as my cries filled the office nobody would come to save me. The lawyers had long before heard my screams but had never once tried to stop the abuse of the overweight novice nun. Now the secret reason for the laughter behind my back became clear and as well as the nasty and amused smiles.</p><p>Many tears now falling down my face to join their singular predecessor, I met Kevin's dark and still longing eyes. "I wish...I wish that I..."</p><p>"That he was dead? Or that you had never even met the magnificently handsome Kevin here?" Milton asked, rising to stand behind his kneeling son and pat him proudly on the shoulders. "But you don't, do you, Sister Erin? That's why you can't spit the words out. Just like you wouldn't change the fact that it was Kevin under the wolf's mask that you were doing everything to..."</p><p>"Yes, yes, yes," I moaned, falling forward against the attorney, my weeping head coming to rest on his wide, strong shoulder. "God forgive me...Oh, <em>yes</em>..."</p><p>Kevin Lomax, in return, leaned his mouth closer to my ear and his breath carressed it gently with each word that he whispered. "I wanted you too, Erin. I wanted you from the moment I saw you walking in that line of nuns. They all seemed so proud and sure. You were the only one I knew whom accepted her doubt. And weighed her compassion against attraction. You were the last but you were the first that touched me. You gave to me your last flower...now give to me your first one too...and this could all be over."</p><p>His hands reached suddenly around to my back and he pulled me onto the floor with him. On our descent, like the fall into hell I had shared with his angel, I could feel his demanding cock still erect and pressed into me. It wanted entrance to where it had so far shown withstraint in taking and my cunt desired to offer invitation, as the lawyer reached underneath my habit to pull down the pair of underwear that was a thin wall between the parts of our bodies that craved one another. The man's free hand found my veil and pulled it down along with removing the coif so that my curled hair was set loose again. Kevin's fingers found my clit and made me moan out loudly as his tongue touched my now exposed neck and ran along the line of my jaw.</p><p>"God forgive me," I moaned again, feeling my nipples swelling as Kevin's mouth bit down on it through my habit, making cream flood from my startlingly aroused hole.</p><p>"God?" Milton said with a laugh while he watched us. "Leave Him out of this. What? He gave you that body and expects you not to use it. You feel that throbbing between those legs of yours? You think that God is gonna come down and fulfill that need for you, Sister? I tell you what...He should be gettin' off that throne of His and begging your forgiveness for almost letting what you got go to waste."</p><p>Kevin's mouth had moved on to the other breast and his fingers were working harder to please me while I lay helplessly on the ground and under his similarly aroused and lustful body.</p><p>"Forgive me," I muttered again, too lost to the pleasure of what was being done to me to think of anything else.</p><p>"FORGIVE <em>HIM</em>!" Milton demanded.</p><p>I could feel Kevin's leaking cock painting my vulva with the precum dripping from it and it felt like he was baptizing my furry mound with his own holy fluid. Moaning again, I parted my legs, feeling as if everything was on fire down there and wonderfully swollen and engorged. I felt my cream oozing out and the attorney's phallus brushed against my own erect clit making me shudder.</p><p>"BUT DON'T DO IT! DON'T YOU EVER FUCKING DO IT! CUZ HE LEFT YOU SISTER! HE LEFT YOU AND ALL YOUR KIND FAR BEHIND HIM AND HE NEVER EVER LOOKED BACK!"</p><p>There was too much rage in the head of the firm's voice for him to be solely talking about me I knew. John Milton had his own war against God. This one thing I understood then: his son and I were only pawns Milton sought to use to help him win.</p><p>And soothe the pain of being forsaken himself.</p><p>He was trying to project his own wound on to me, denying his own sins. But I could not accept his rage; I knew and accepted my own faults and knew that they weren't God's fault. If I broke my vows it would be my sin and I could not trick myself into believing it would be anybody else's, Kevin Lomax and John Milton's included.</p><p>But what good would my love be if I denied the source from where it had first been given? Could I love Kevin truly when I had forsaken my first love?</p><p>When I had made the vow to give myself to God alone it had been my own choice. God had not forced me into it. And just as God had brought Kevin Lomax into my life, if it was His will, then he would take him from it too.</p><p>The attorney's lips all over my throat and neck, traveling towards my lips while his penis was similarly heading to the head of my cunt and preparing to enter it, I cried out loudly in pain from my need and desire for the member but more powerfully for Kevin himself, accepting now that I could have neither.</p><p>"NO!" I screamed and kicked the attorney forcefully off from me while he was vulnerable.</p><p>Kevin fell backwards, his red cock still ready, though, its owner was obviously upset by my denial. "Erin," Kevin stated and started to reach out for me as I scrambled to my feet.</p><p>I did not look back at him, afraid if my eyes stayed on him too long I would only fall to temptation. Instead, I turned to the doorway and started to run.</p><p>"ERIN!" I heard Kevin screaming in pain and fury behind me but I pushed myself forward.</p><p>Now the laughter that the lawyers had saved to release behind my back was offered to my face. Their lips were turned in cruel smiles and they pointed at me trying to run with my underwear still around my ankles.</p><p>"Now she's waddling like a penguin too," one woman shrieked with laughter.</p><p>One man shouted out, "Or maybe Kev finally gave it to her and she can't walk."</p><p>"Was it good?" I heard asked repeatedly as I fled.</p><p>Wailing in humiliation, I made it to the door to the stairway, afraid that if I were to take the elevator it would only drop me further into hell.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Back at the Abbey I was too devastated to tell anyone about what had happened. I now knew that John Milton and Kevin Lomax had been playing some twisted game with me. Lomax had claimed that the two men in the mugshots he had shown me held some hatred towards anything religious. But weeping in my bed, I believed that he was only clandestinely speaking about John Milton and himself.</p><p>Milton loathed his Creator. It had always been clear from his irreverent manner and his outright blasphemy. It would have amused him to make it a sport to taint and corrupt a nun. I shuddered thinking about how much of my degredation he had made public knowledge at Milton, Chadwick and Waters. Had he filmed it all? Did tapes exist somewhere inside of its office rooms of Kevin's repeated violations of me?</p><p>Was this what Mrs. Lomax had tried to warn me of?</p><p>I might once have had evidence against father and son but I had voluntarily surrendered it to Kevin, whom had only deceived me besides having sexually abused me.</p><p>Thinking of my friend, I just could not tell how much he had done from Milton's hatred or how much his own lust had forced him to play along.</p><p>
  <em>"I wanted you too, Erin. I wanted you from the moment I saw you walking in that line of nuns..."</em>
</p><p>I closed my eyes at the remembrance of the words and how much they still stirred desire inside of me and an urge to return to him.</p><p>But I had made my choice.</p><p>Holding the body that Kevin Lomax had used often without my memory, knowing it still belonged to him in ways that shamed and excited me, I suddenly felt dirty. Pulling myself off from the bed, I dragged myself out my sanctuary's door and to the showers to try to burn away the memory of a certain lawyer's touch. Walking down the Abbey's corridor's, lost in dark thoughts and dark feelings, I barely realized the slightest trace of some foul odor in the building, as if something had started to go bad within its sacred walls.</p><p>* * *</p><p>"They finally found the woman that Mr. Lomax cleared of those two deaths," Sister Beatrice told me four days later. It was following choir and she had approached me after a half-hearted effort of my vocal chords to sing "Ave Maria" for Mass on December 25th. It might only have been Halloween, but already the little nun's thoughts had turned to Christmas.</p><p>"I wasn't aware that she was missing," I mumbled.</p><p>"Sister Erin! You still like the comics, I see! I can't blame you, but don't ever tell the Reverend Mother that I said so. It was the night of the hoax with Sister Johanne and yourself that she disappeared. They found her body by the docks. I thought you might like to know because of your friendship with Mr. Lomax. Although, I dare say, he'd have told you himself."</p><p>"I've stopped seeing him," I stated sadly, thinking of the various messages my fellow Sisters had given to me from the Reverend Mother that he desired another meeting. Messages I had subsequently ignored.</p><p>"Why? Did something happened?" she asked in concern.</p><p>I shook my head. "Our counseling was no longer working as I thought or as I had hoped."</p><p>The older nun shook her head in sorrow. "That's too bad. Sometimes it happens. You musn't blame yourself." Her hand was on my shoulder patting it.</p><p>I could not take her kindness. I broke down into tears and fell into her arms, wishing that my mother was near to offer comfort. "Shhh...there there," Sister Beatrice whispered soothingly. "He might still find his way back. I know how much you care for him. Not all of God's children stay lost from Him. Some eventually find their way home."</p><p>"I hope so...I..." and then I wretched in my sorrow and from a fresh wave of the nauseating smell which had claimed the whole Abbey over the past four days.</p><p>"Dear me!" Sister Beatrice exclaimed. "I do wish they'd find where that's coming from!"</p><p>I stood up straight before asking, "Does the Reverend Mother know what it is yet?"</p><p>The woman shook her head. "She thinks Caroline misplaced a delivery from Maxwell...says the girl probably got distracted and forgot where she put it."</p><p>I thought of the young nun's cavorting with the delivery boy and saw some sense in the theory.</p><p>Sister Beatrice shrugged her thin shoulders. "She said it was no real cause for worry...just a rotting piece of meat."</p><p>* * *</p><p>In the late evening, the Reverend Mother summoned me to meet with her again and I braced myself for having to explain in greater detail why I had abandoned my counseling sessions with Kevin Lomax.</p><p>From the moment I walked into the room and saw her studying me reproachfully from behind her desk, I knew that Kevin had already contacted her. I stood silently before her, feeling as if my time at the convent was marked in hours not days.</p><p>"I received an almost <em>desperate</em> call from Mr. Lomax. It seems that you have been avoiding going to the scheduled appointments. Is there a reason?"</p><p>My heart shattered, longing to see the man it belonged to. That he was desperate pleased me but I focused on the older nun's question instead in order to turn my back on the dangerous love I still held for my abuser.</p><p>Disgrace...if I told her the truth I could expect that one word alongside banishment from the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. Still I remembered all too well the lesson of lamb and wolf and was tired of anything which was not the truth.</p><p>"He had made advances towards me," I replied in fear.</p><p>The Reverend Mother raised her eyebrows in skeptiscm and shock. "On <em>you</em>, Sister Erin?"</p><p>"Yes," I said with a hard swallow.</p><p>"And why would he choose <em>you</em>, pray tell? You are hardly fit for one of Mr. Lomax's standing. Did you not see the woman by his side in Vatican city?"</p><p>I blinked back tears, insulted and further humiliated. It was impossible for me to answer her question for I could not understand why he had wanted me in the first place, I knew, as well.</p><p>"You must have led him on, you tawdry cheap tart!" she hissed.</p><p>"No!" I argued shaking my head in vehement protest.</p><p>"You must have! It will be your word against his," she chastised. "And who would believe a fat, stupid, unpretty thing such as yourself! You will bring shame upon this Abbey and upon God! Yes, your word against his and it is little wonder whom the people will believe!"</p><p>"No!" I cried, my mind rushing to anything that could help me prove my claim. "It's not my word alone...when SisterJohanne returns..."</p><p>"She's back already," the Reverend Mother informed primly. "She's been back four days now."</p><p>"Why have I not seen her?" I asked in shock.</p><p>"She has been in her room...she would hate for the other nuns to see the state that she's in."</p><p>"I have to talk to her," I said. "Maybe she can help prove to you..."</p><p>"Maybe?" the nun scowled. "You sound unconvinced of it yourself. But, please, I insist...go and talk to my little sparrow..."</p><p>Turning around, I grabbed the doorknob but something urged me to glance over my shoulder before my departure. The sight which greeted me was enough to send a chill like the woman's old, gnarled and cold fingers running up along my spine. I caught a flash of a smile on her ancient, sallow face; it was the smile of someone harbouring a secret, the one on the face of a prankster on April first. As soon as I had spotted it, however, it was gone and her usual frown had taken its place.</p><p>My hand trembling on the knob, I turned it and started my walk to Sister Beatrice's room.</p><p>I could see the dark sky outside the window and hear the cry of the Halloween celebrations outside. The moon was full in her sky and she whispered for me to run away and outside but I did not listen.</p><p>Although Johanne had seemed not to acknowledge what had occurred between her, the lamb, the wolf and myself, now that the stained whimple had been taken from me, she was the sole chance I had of clearing my reputation in the eyes of the head of the Abbey. Without her, I would not be allowed to stay and the other nun's suspicion that my relations with Lomax had been as scandlous and untowards of me as they had suspected and mercilessly gossiped about behind my back.</p><p>Soiling the grieving Kevin Lomax's reputation was equally undesirous to me. But if I convinced the Reverend Mother that I had been poorly used then perhaps I could be permitted to stay without the subject reaching anyone else's ears. Sister Johanne being the Reverend Mother's favored novice, she would hold the power to control her tongue and Kevin and I could escape the situation and move on with our lives, in the same city but forever separated then.</p><p>As I neared Sister Johanne's room, I noticed that the sound of my simple shoes on the hardwood floor grew in the increasingly more quiet Abbey. More disturbing, however, was that the stench of decay was growing stronger the closer I came to the room. By the time I was standing in front of it, I was close to throwing up.</p><p>"Johanne?" I asked, knocking on the door, and believing that I had heard some sound from the opposite side of it.</p><p>When no response came, I tried saying it one more time only for the door to creak open slightly from the gentle pounding of my hand on the wood. A blast of putrid air rushed up the nostrils of my large nose and I pushed the door open slowly to see what my sense of smell was already disclosing to me.</p><p>The Reverend Mother was right: Sister Johanne had returned.</p><p>On the nun's bed sat the cage of spiked bars on both sides. And still impaled on the inner side of her cell was the critical nun, whom had long since stopped passing judgement to receive her own. Her flesh had begun to decay, aided by the swarm of flies which had taken large gory chunks from off of her tormented face; that same face appeared to be moving somehow, despite the fact that her expression remained frozen and horrified. Only afterward did I realize that what I mistook for movement was really thousands of maggots wriggling around in the poor nun's wounds.</p><p>Gagging violently, the evening's meal coming up with great force, I fell on to the hardhood floor, realizing the Reverend Mother's own personal joke and how right she had been in her words to Sister Beatrice.</p><p>The smell had been from a rotting piece of meat, after all.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Kind of a lighthearted note after that disturbing note, I guess, but...</p><p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>Yay!!! The Dodgers won!!! :D &lt;3</p><p>I have loved them since researching Brooklyn for some fiction years ago. I learned how Brooklynites had to dodge the trolleys to see them. So, since then, they have been those old Trolley Dodgers to me. I read about and watched their biographies and loved them as the L.A. Dodgers too!</p><p>I asked my mom to keep me up to date on how they did. She'd tape the baseball scores for me. She wasn't really a fan of the sport, hockey was her preferred one between them, but we'd watch the baseball recaps on CTV together. I have fond memories of those times. She was always so happy to show them to me; it made her happy. And knowing now what she was going through, and keeping secret, that makes me happy too.</p><p>There was this funny time once, though. I had asked her how the Blue Jays were doing and the Orioles. She said good. She then proceeded to tell me that the robins were also doing well and that she'd often watch them eating worms out in our driveway. :/ I don't think we were talking about the same thing. </p><p>But the Dodgers were my team and then the Cubs. And if you ever read my author's note to my Hardball story you'll know all about the reason for that.</p><p>But, this year, I was so happy to see photos of you in a Dodgers uniform, Keanu, and with the team from a few years back.</p><p>Then the Dodgers actually made it to the World Series! :O</p><p>So, I thought, well, I was hoping, that if they won it that it might be a sign too. I know we won't be together but that I'm supposed to be here cheering you on, supporting you and loving you too. That it's destiny and something God worked out. </p><p>And then they actually won! :D &lt;3</p><p>And the last time that happened was 1988! There is those 8s again! Infinity at work.</p><p>So, I know that I am meant to keep writing these and being your fan.</p><p>Not that it woulda stopped me if they hadn't (you're stuck with me forever, I'm afraid.) What did those old Trolley Dodgers used to say, after all? Wait 'till next year! I just don't have to do that this year...</p><p>And, who knows, maybe next year you'll read these! ;D</p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. False Sanctuary from False Sisters</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Another horrifying discovery awaits me inside of the Abbey...</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Turns out, I needed another chapter. :/</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Crumpled on the floor, moving my hand out of the way before the vomit came spilling towards it, I heard another sound destroy the quiet of the Abbey to join the buzzing flies still making a feast of Sister Johanne. The united voices of the other nuns came drifting down the corridors of the old building towards me, the song on their lips "Ave Maria" but their voices sounding weaker and off in some unnerving way, as if they had lost their guide and subsequently their way as well.</p><p>My knees shaking, making me stumble as I rose to my feet, I followed the noise back down the hallway I had just traversed, once more ignoring the moon and her desperate warning.</p><p>The song of the Sisters led me fittingly to the choir room. The door was opened as I neared it and some other scent was now rushing to mingle with that of the decaying flesh of Sister Johanne. It was strong and familiar, thick, if a scent could be described as such, and my throat clenched in memory as it remembered the same substance coating it after the birth of the stone imp.</p><p>
  <em>"AVE MARIA...AVE MARIAAAA....MARIAAAAA..."</em>
</p><p>Slowly I peered around the edge of the door and was greeted by a sight that would have caused me to vomit again if I hadn't already completely expelled the contents of my stomach beforehand and if shock had not made me too frozen to move.</p><p>Three of my fellow Sisters were standing in the choir room, practicing their Christmas Mass while many of the others lay mutilated and bloodied on the space in front of them. Limbs and body parts were scattered here and there across the room's well polished hardwood floor, now painted in crimson to match the arterial spray which was covering the walls and even brutalling marking the white keys of Sister Beatrice's piano.</p><p>Tears flooded my eyes and my nose stung painfully as I saw Beatrice's torso lying bloodied and torn in the middle of the floor. Her head was close to her neck, where it should have been lying, and she stared at me with that same worried and kind gaze that I associated as belonging uniquely to her in the whole of the Abbey of the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart. There was shock on her face and I understood that even at the moment of her death she had not seen it coming and her concern had been for her murderers, two of which were still playing with the main part of her poor desecrated body.</p><p>Sisters Caroline and Sarah's hands were buried in the opened stomach of the older nun and they were laughing together like two little girls making imaginary pies in a puddle of mud. Removing their hands in unison, the choir still singing off key behind them, they held up what they had discovered and taken for a prize. In one pair of hands,  Sister Sarah grasped part of Beatrice's intestines, while in another, Sister Caroline held the end of it. They laughed together and took turns placing it over their shoulders, like some boa made of gore. In glee they bit the organ and tasted of it, blood falling down their chins.</p><p>The sight impulsively made me turn to flee but a foot found my back and my body fell forward instead, sliding deeper into the room on a blood covered floor. I came to a halt three feet infront of Sister Beatrice's sweet head and I lifted my own from off the ground, feeling her blood and the blood of the others warmly painting my chin, cheeks and whimple.</p><p>Sisters Caroline and Sarah stood, the large bowel falling off from them as the amusement similarly fell away from their faces. The nun whom had pushed me, a Sister Amy, came to stand painfully and forcefully on my back, while what remained of the choir stopped their chorus to look down at me in similar reproach.</p><p>"Well, what do we have <em>here</em>?" Sister Caroline asked.</p><p>"Sister Erin, the <em>counselling</em> nun," Sister Sarah replied.</p><p>"Is <em>that</em> what she does?"</p><p>"That's what she <em>claims</em> to do."</p><p>"WHAT HAVE <em>YOU</em> DONE?" I shouted in far greater emotional pain than the physical one I was suffering.</p><p>"A cleansing; like the Reverend Mother asked of us," Sister Sarah explained. "We are to usher in a new world, blessed by a new, more perfect and divine race."</p><p>The living Sisters all exchanged serene glances between themselves, all in silent understanding. I watched them lift up their habits in unison, even the woman whose foot was still buried harshly in my back. Their stomachs exposed now, I remembered the cruel words of my fellow Sister days before.</p><p>
  <em>"Maybe she's pregnant under the habit...It would be hard to tell especially since she's fat."</em>
</p><p>It turned out the habit made it hard to tell anyway, even without the weight.</p><p>The women were all in various stages of pregnancy. A Sister Eugene even appeared to be in her third trimester.</p><p>"We are holy and we are warriors," Sister Caroline said, letting her habit fall back down to her feet. Dipping her finger in the blood of Sister Beatrice, she ran a finger from her forehead down the bridge or her nose and to her bloody chin. She then made a shorter bloodied line under her eyes, creating a profane cross of crimson.</p><p>Sister Caroline repeated the horrible perversion of faith on the face of her friend, before Sister Sarah bent down and retrieved a large Butcher's knife from off of the floor by her feet. Being closer now, I could see mixed with the corpses and blood the artillery from the kitchen and I shuddered in terror as Sister Caroline chose a cleaver from the weapons by her feet.</p><p>"She told us to let you live," Sister Sarah confessed, walking towards me with Sister Caroline by her side. "But..."</p><p>"We really don't think she was thinking clearly," Sister Caroline finshed as they flanked either side of my neck.</p><p>"Not when you've been fornicating with that lawyer..."</p><p>"Especially not with <em>that</em>," the nun whom had had the cock of the delivery boy buried deeply up her ass agreed.</p><p>"The Reverend Mother must not have been thinking clearly at all," both girls stated in unison as they looked at each other and then raised their weapons and smiled at me in devilish glee.</p><p>I did not scream, although, I wanted to. Instead, with any power I would have spent on the act, I bolted backwards as the cleaver and the knife were brought down on what was meant to be my neck. Sister Amy went falling off from me as the cleaver in Sister Caroline's hands came swiftly down on Sister Sarah's knife weilding own hand instead.</p><p>The thinner nun began to scream in agony as the butcher's knife fell out of her hand, along with her thumb and the halves of her fingers.</p><p>As Sister Caroline swore and cursed in apology, I rose to my feet and ran to the choir room door as quickly as I could, avoiding Sister Amy's poor attempt at catching me. Her arms grasped thin air while her foot slipped on blood and she went spilling forward.</p><p>"WHORE! BLASPHEMER! UNWORTHY THING!" I heard Sister Caroline shouting out behind me in rage as Sister Sarah continued on with her shrieking.</p><p>I was crying violently as I ran down the corridor and to the front door, throwing myself into the night and finally under the moon, whom had tried to warn me. Going to the gate, nestled innocently between two high stone walls, I thought that it would open easily and help me in my escape. However, I pulled on it several times without it giving way and frantically saw that it had been padlocked. Not knowing if it had been done by Sister Beatrice, fearful of Halloween pranksters, or the Reverend Mother, whom had had her own nightly horrors seemingly plotted out, I called out for help, shaking the rattling gate only to see an eerily dead New York City street before me.</p><p>On any other night there would have been traffic or, at least, a few pedastrians. But now it was a vacant and dead thing, offering me no salvation. Hearing the sounds of movement behind me, I spun around and ran towards the next potential sanctuary: the Catherdral. Bursting in through its doors, I cried and shut them quickly, taking the veil from off my head and looping it through the handles with several knots to try to keep it locked.</p><p>Crying, I backed away from the doors and turned to see the altar and the large crucified Christ hanging over it. The hunting calls of the nuns outside reached my ears and I covered my mouth to stop a scream from escaping. Thinking I heard the back door to the church opening, and not knowing what else to do, I ran to the pews and fell onto my hands and knees between them, praying inside of my head for God to help me get away from the other Sisters whom had lost their minds.</p><p>Remembering the blood and Sister Beatrice's severed head, I collapsed onto the church's floor, shaking and holding myself so I would not bang accidentally into the wood surrounding me and alert the newcomers of where I was hiding.</p><p>Silence for seconds and then suddenly a familiar noise graced the stolen church.</p><p>Petrified, I listened to the sound of the approaching footsteps, grateful, if only, that it was a singular pair and not the rest of what remained of the Abbey. When the footfalls stopped at the end of the aisle where I was lying, shivering and cowering, I lifted my head in fright to see, not a pair of blood covered women's shoes that had once been given with our habits but a pair of shining, expensive shoes of black belonging to a man.</p><p>My breathing, now deep, almost echoed inside of the church with each exhalation. I raised my gaze up a pair of long legs and a sharp, black suit until my eyes finally came to rest on the expressionless face of Kevin Lomax. He was standing perfectly still, just another statue in the Catholic structure filled with them, and studying me in some almost lifeless fashion.</p><p>There was nothing else I could do then.</p><p>Grateful to see the man, even after all he had done to me, I scrambled to my feet, weeping in relief over the fact that there had been offered inside of the holy place some glimmer of hope and of light to me. I fell against the lawyer's chest and wrapped my arms around his stiff body, smearing blood on his immaculate suit.</p><p>"Kevin...oh, Kevin," I whispered, holding him tightly. "Thank God that you're here...it'll be okay now."</p><p>"Why couldn't you just make <em>love</em> to me?" Kevin whispered and his voice held as much sorrow and grief as it reserved for those times when he mentioned the late Mary Ann Lomax.</p><p>Looking up into his face, I saw that the pain was filling his eyes as well, making them seem black and devoid of the hope and the light I had foolishly believed he had offered. Staring into them, the sounds of the false holy warriors still outside the church, I felt Kevin Lomax grab the back of my neck before he suddenly and forcefully hit me, sending me falling into a darkness far deeper than that of his mournful, tormented eyes.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Good. Had to separate that from the rest of the last chapter. It felt better that way. Now I can finish up for tomorrow. :/</p><p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>I don't really have a note for you today. So, can I just say hi?</p><p>Hi!</p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. The Truth Lying Behind the Devil's Paintbrush</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>John Milton explains fully about his plans for me, while I discover the truth behind the weed that haunted my childhood in the soul of Kevin Lomax.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Happy Halloween Keanu and everybody! :D &lt;3</p><p>Can't believe this is the last chapter. Thank You, God, I finished it in time and it stayed true to the vision I had for it! It was originally just a one shot but became a multi chapter deal. Actually, it's the first novel length entry in this series that I have finished, being over 50,000 words. I'm pretty happy about that! :D &lt;3</p><p>This is very much a work about free will. I know you said once, Keanu, that you don't believe in it. But I do, as does the film that inspired it, so I hope you can see my point of view, at least, for as long as it would take you to read it. :D &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Darkness became dark maroon with the simple act of returning consciousness. That maroon similarly became a shade of gray with bursts of dancing orange, red and golden tears as I opened my eyes for the first time since Kevin had struck me and I had fallen swiftly into the black. With a few rapid blinks, things became much clearer and I realized hazily that the teardrops dancing in the shades of the Devil's Paintbrush were candles and that I was still in the cathedral that was to the side of the Abbey, where nuns had gone mad and committed murder.</p><p>I was no longer in my nun's habit. Feeling air on my skin, I looked down in horror to see that I was naked. During my time in the dark, I had been stripped completely and tied to the altar at the front of the church; so that my legs were spread while my arms were raised at either side of my head. I looked down my body to see the pubic hair catching the light of the candles. It was a bush of red and I was reminded of God telling Moses to remove his sandals, for the ground was holy where he trod.</p><p>At the end of the altar, between my legs, I saw movement in the shadows and a tremble like a small quake seized my naked body. When Kevin Lomax stepped out from the black, still wearing his suit of a similar shade, but now spattered in blood from my embrace, I was both relieved and yet horrified. In his hands, he held one of the coups, adorned with a large ornately carved angel, still filled with holy water. He had taken it somehow from the head of the church, and though it was very heavy, he carried it with him as if it were the stuffed rabbit doll that had been my favorite unliving companion during my childhood.</p><p>Slowly he came to where my head was lying and he stared down at me, returned to his state of stone after a hint of humanity.</p><p>"Please, Kevin, help me," I whispered.</p><p>But, though he stared at me for a second or two longer, he remained unmoved. I watched as the lawyer dipped his hand into the holy water and brought it to my face, washing away the blood of the dead nuns from my pale cheeks.</p><p>"Kevin..."</p><p>I tried again, our eyes locked in the candle filled church until he broke the stare and turned his vision lower and to the rest of my body. Cupping another handful of water, Kevin brought it to my chest, letting it hover over it for a moment, like some cloud constructed of fingers and palm, before releasing the clenching of those same fingers and letting the liquid fall like holy raindrops on to my breasts. The water was cold on my nipples and made them tingle as the rest of the mound of flesh broke out in goose bumps. I watched Lomax's eyes fill with desire as he took in the sight of the water cascading off from my skin and onto the altar.</p><p>Lower and lower, Kevin Lomax appointed my body with the holy water and by the time he reached my groin, my clit was already throbbing and peeking out from the unwanted arousal of the man's action and the clear fact, betrayed by his eyes, breath and bulge at the front of his trousers, that he was becoming sexually excited by pouring the water on my naked flesh.</p><p>"Please, let me go," I pleaded again.</p><p>But he only repeated the act of letting his hand rain over me in sacrament.</p><p>Now he let it fall onto the erect reddening nub and sent a wave of pleasure through the nerves surrounding it. The holy water fell into the soft folds surrounding it until it merged with the cream spilling from my opening in physical excitation.</p><p>"No," I whimpered while Kevin ended the ritual, covering my legs with the last few drops of the fluid.</p><p>"For fuck's sake, that took you long enough," I heard a familiar voice complain from the back of the church.</p><p>A new light appeared in the back pew and I squinted my eyes to see the Reverend Mother walking down the aisle, a cigarette between her withered lips as she smoked it brazenly.</p><p>She looked up and down the length of my exposed and bound body and then to Kevin Lomax standing between my legs, his cock swelling and creating a greater peak in his trousers as he was given a clear view of what was usually hidden between the lips below.</p><p>"Sister Erin," the old woman said in severe disapproval, shaking her head as she hid her hands in the opposing sleeves. The cigarette disappeared up them as well. But though I expected to see her catch on flames, not a single wisp of smoke appeared, as if she were made of fire herself. "Tsk, tsk, tsk...I knew that you were leading this poor, sweet, <em>innocent</em> boy on with your <em>sinful</em>, wicked ways."</p><p>Kevin stayed silent, standing there, refusing to look at my face and the tears now joining the blessed water on them.</p><p>"You...you had the rest of the Sisters murder Sister Beatrice," I accused. "And most of the others...wh-why? What the hell is going on?"</p><p>"Watch your language!" she snapped. "Need I remind you of where we are? Although...your choice of words is quite fitting..."</p><p>The cigarette reappeared and she gave it a long, slow drag before placing it on the ground before her. I watched as a shoe appeared out from the habit, wholly as masculine as Kevin's, and it stepped on the butt, extinguishing it.</p><p>"I could only use a few of 'em," the Reverend Mother stated, dropping her usual speech pattern of cool primness to adopt one that I recognized as belonging to someone else entirely. "Well, I couldn't damn well use <em>every</em> one of you," the Reverend Mother said in the exact voice of another. "When I started this fucking Abbey, I had a set plan. I needed one special cunt of a nun and the others were all expendable. Except for the ones I could use to create more special people like Kevin over there."</p><p>I glanced at my love, whom still refused to look at me but now would not look at the older nun as well. His eyes focused on the stain glassed image of Christ captured in one of the church's windows.</p><p>"Kevin?" I asked but whom, lawyer or nun, I did not know.</p><p>"Yeah...I could always use more servants...so I slowly managed to seduce my dear little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart one by one and get some of them pregnant when God blinked His eyes. Sometimes as the Reverend Mother you see before you..."</p><p>She held out her arms in show and then slowly and frighteningly changed into someone else while my brain screamed at me that it was impossible.</p><p>"Sometimes as old Maxwell here," the delivery boy said with a crude smile before changing one last time so the voice finally matched the face I knew it from.</p><p>John Milton smiled at me in proud and wicked glee. "And sometimes as this handsome little devil himself."</p><p>"What....are you?" I asked.</p><p>Milton used the name of the man depicted on the cross above me in vain and fixed me with a look of pure scornful amusement. "I just told you, you stupid cunt."</p><p>"You're the Devil," I said and shuddered.</p><p>"Bingo!" the man said and slapped his hands together. "Imagine that, huh? You became a nun to get closer to God. Well, SURPRISE! You only got closer to me instead!"</p><p>I spit at him from my place on the altar, an act which seemed to shock both Milton and his son.</p><p>"Damnit, you're a feisty one. Whatever were you thinking becoming a nun anyway? You're too full of passion, want and desire. Why when Kevin told me that you would be the only one to deny him, I thought he was out of his fucking mind! Fat girls are full of need. But you did...and so <em>you</em>, my dear Sister Erin, won the right to be tied up to that altar there with your pretty little virgin cunt as our sacrifice."</p><p>I looked to the attorney, whom I had believed I'd been meeting with to guide towards spiritual awakening, but while he finally met my eyes, he would not speak but only stared at me blankly.</p><p>"Kev has a real good eye for reading people, just like I told you when we first met," Milton spoke with pride. "The finest juror selector, I ever fucking had. He looked at that long line of nuns I marched on past him that day in Trinity and he chose the perfect one...the one he could fuck and give me my one true heir...A creation capable or destroying the Creator..."</p><p>A chill coursed tgrough my body and tears filled my eyes again at the blasphemy and what John Milton was telling me he had long planned out to use me for.</p><p>"You see," John continued. "I tried it with old Kevin here before; that was with my daughter, his sister Christabella. That relied on consent, though, from both parties. Then Mary Ann went and spoiled everything by eating the stupid bitch! There went <em>that</em> plan!"</p><p>He walked a little closer to the altar. "But, if anything, at least, Kevin came to his senses...started to see God for the sick fuck that He is. Never one to be bested, I decided to look at my other options...I remembered this Abbey. What do you know! Turns out an actual <em>sister</em> wasn't required. One in the spiritual sense would work just fine. Makes funny fuckin' sense in a way...poetic irony and all that bullshit: Daughter of God, Son of Satan..."</p><p>I glanced at Kevin in horror, knowing now what <em>he</em> was too.</p><p>The Devil began to pace back and forth before the altar. Waving a finger in the air, he exclaimed, "But if we went that route it HAD to be rape. Consent was no longer an issue. Lack of consent was what mattered. But what woman in their fucking mind would turn down Kevin Lomax? He's got everything; more than that, he could convince anyone of <em>anything</em>. Look at all the criminals he duped a hundred juries into setting free!"</p><p>My eyes rested on the young lawyer once more and he did not so much as blink.</p><p>"But that's when he saw you and he knew that you, little Sister, were the one. And I gotta give him credit; he was right."</p><p>"WHAT ABOUT THE WAREHOUSE?" I demanded in outrage.</p><p>Milton smiled and stopped before me once again. "We put you through that as a test. Another necessity, so to speak. It showed that you were pure of heart enough to do that for poor, dearly departed Johanne's sake. But when it was just Kevin and you about to do the nasty on his office floor, you held on to your fucking, stupid little vows, <em>religiously</em>."</p><p>He applauded in mock praise. "You remain pure and devoted to your God. Bravo!"</p><p>The head of Milton, Chadwick and Waters closed his eyes and drew a cross in the air over my tied up form. "Bless you, bless you, a million times bless you, Sister Erin," John Milton said in false reverence and with an overdramatic bow. "May that knowledge comfort you to know as my son fucks your brains out and your God listens to your cries and does fucking nothing."</p><p>John Milton stood suddenly and looked at me in pure hatred. "Now go to it, Kev. Best to get one in on Halloween."</p><p>The Devil walked away and my eyes flew to Kevin Lomax.</p><p>His eyes linked with mine and the Devil's son began to remove his clothing, starting with his tie of silk.</p><p>"Kevin please...don't," I begged in desperation. "You're better than this...I know you are."</p><p>The man threw his tie and then jacket on to the floor, watching their fall before turning to look at me once more</p><p>"And how do you know, Sister Erin?" Kevin inquired his fingers now working on the buttons of his shirt. "Do you think you know me? All of those sessions together. Didn't you ever listen? I kept telling you that I wanted to be damned."</p><p>Remembering well that he had, I started to scream for help,  while he unbuckled his trousers, unashamed now that I'd be discovered in such a humiliating position and only fiercely wanting to avoid becoming pregnant with some abomination against my God.</p><p>"HELP ME! HELLLLLLLLLPPPPP ME! SOMEBODY PLEASE! RAPE!!!!! MURDER!!!! THEY'RE GOING TO KILL ME!!!!"</p><p>Kevin Lomax stood at the end of the altar in all of his naked glory, his cock aiming towards God and crawled on to the sacred place between my widely spread legs.</p><p>"Believe me, I'm not going to kill you, Erin," he whispered softly before returning his mouth to the place where it had already been and which responded with traitorous happiness at his return.</p><p>"NO KEVIN! NO! NOOOO! STOP ITTT!" I screamed and thrashed around on the altar.</p><p>While I was fighting, my cunt was melting into the warm mouth licking and suckling on anything tongue and lips could find. The lawyer tasted now the fluid of my shame mixed with the water which had filled the font. My cries for help degenerated into sounds of fought pleasure. My cunt was spilling and swelling, pushing me towards my first orgasm on the sacrificial table.</p><p>"KEVIN, PLEASE STOP!" I begged. "I'M COMING!"</p><p>Not dissuaded by my words but encouraged to my increasing horror, his tongue went deeper inside my vagina,  more then I thought was possible, and I felt as if he were licking the womb he was preparing to fill.</p><p>"GOD, NO!!!!" I cried as I lost it and my body convulsed on the table with Kevin's handsome face pressed forcefully into my spasming, parted folds.</p><p>The climax finished, I lay back pleading with God to forgive me, aware that the carved Jesus was watching from the crucifix my violation and only becoming more turned on by the realization.</p><p>Kevin looked up at me. He was kneeling, his cock looking horrifyingly large, raw and beginning to drip wet with precum. His chin was wet too and he licked off my cream from his full lips as he slid sensuously over my immobilized figure. The red cock began to paint my stomach with dirty strokes and I absently thought how it was a paintbrush now too belonging to Satan. I whimpered, becoming a little girl both attracted to and repulsed by the flowers growing around her childhood home.</p><p>"Please, Kevin," I whispered. "I don't want to." The words came out childish now too and I looked at him leaning over my breasts, too large to be anything but an adults, as he looked down at me with his own adult desire.</p><p>The fingers on his right hand found some of my loose hair and twirled it around it before letting it fall back to lie close to a nipple. This he then took and played with, rubbing it slowly and with erotic skill, resurrecting my clitoris and vagina back into arousal.</p><p>"Too late," he said and brought his lips to my semi hard tit in order to suckle it.</p><p>Pleasure, strong and undeniable spread straight to my groin and I moaned out another protest as I fell under a wave of physical bliss. He administered quick kisses around the fat piece of flesh around the nipple, suckled it some more before turning to the neglected breast and coaxing it into full tingling awareness of the physical ecstasy brought already to its partner.</p><p>"NOOO," I cried, crying in remembrance of my vows and how I was being forced to forsake them.</p><p>Kevin Lomax ravenously grabbed and devoured my breasts and I felt my hole opening wide for something I feared, while my clit was a hard knot of nerves close to it.</p><p>"KEVIN STOP!" I begged.</p><p>"I AGREE! KEVIN JUST <em>STOP</em> FUCKING AROUND AND DO IT!" John Milton shouted out. "ENOUGH WITH THE DAMN FOREPLAY!"</p><p>Kevin's eyes darted to mine over my heaving chest and as I was about to scream out another denial of him, he moved his strong body more sinuously over mine and clamped his lips on to my own to stop another pitiful beseechment from escaping. I fought for breath while he tasted me hungrily and with force. My mouth felt bruised as the man pushed his fully hardened penis inside of me for the first time, taking me by surprise.</p><p>A cry of pain flew down Kevin Lomax's throat and he gave a harder thrust in reflexive defense, making my head fall down on to the table as I wailed in fresh pain. The first feeling was one of invasion. Some huge beast had forced its way inside of me, without my permission. But even past this violation, I felt sexual fulfillment dancing in its own celebration. My cunt wrapped around the cunt, whispering to the invader that it was welcomed, wanted and beloved.</p><p>It had been waiting for it for so long, after all.</p><p>I moaned in helpless realization that, though, I was being raped, there was a sense of a long ago abandoned dream finally arriving to a state of waking reality. It was hard not to surrender to it entirely: that pleasure and that dream coming true.</p><p>"Don't," I cried as Kevin began to thrust, finding his own passion and fulfillment in my cleanching cunt.</p><p>He began to push inside of me violently, almost seeming to forget himself.</p><p>"Oh God," I heard him whisper in clear shock as he hammered into me.</p><p>His cock was in full possession of him. It was sliding up and down my vagina and with each journey its owner was going mad with lust. The lawyer buried his head into my full bust and did everything he possibly could with it with the mouth he used so well in the courtroom.</p><p>"Oh, God, no..." I cried feeling my second coming.</p><p>With a burst I orgasmed, my cunt calling out the seed of John Milton's son. Kevin was calling out loudly while my cunt betrayed me with its furious, covetous clenching. I thought he would never stop his spilling and my womb would never stop its swallowing but eventually the deluge was finished and Kevin lay on top of me, spent and exhausted. I bit my lip, painfully trying to stop a wail of pain that I knew would only please John Milton. He was still somewhere in the church watching us and praying to himself for his future. Kevin's lips meanwhile found my breast once again and lustily began to suck on my nipple like some man child wishing to receive sexual gratification and comfort all at once.</p><p>I thought the ordeal was over until Kevin's cock returned to life once more inside of me and he grabbed the tit he was feasting upon in a way solely belonging to that of a sexually aroused grown man and I knew that the horror of humiliation and cursed rapture was staring again.</p><p>I screamed out loudly as Kevin resumed the persistent thrusting of his hips and he took me again.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Six times Kevin Lomax raped me upon the altar in the small cathedral. And each time, he managed to hold on for longer. I remained conscious for each lengthening period of his passion and as I lay under him,  I wondered if I could endure it. My mind was breaking, my body was being overwhelmed with a pleasure my soul did not want. And everytime I hoped it had finished it started once more.</p><p>Weeping, a lost and wounded animal under a man I still could not hate, we both suffered our sixth climax and Kevin lay on me again, his own exhaustion evident. This time when his sore lips found my similarly cracked nipple, he sucked on it lazily, barely having the strength to manage much more.</p><p>"That's fine," John Milton said, returning to his place before our joined bodies on the altar. "Get up and off and out of her, kid. Time to let dear old dad have a go at her."</p><p>The words made the attorney raise his head from off the pillow of my breast and glare at his father. I sensed that though he was angry, Lomax had half suspected the sudden, unwanted turn of events. "She's mine. That's what you promised..."</p><p>"Yeah, well, I get to change my mind," John Milton snapped. "I'm writing the book and I'm the fuckin' editor too...rewrite says I get her now. If you didn't get it done by now you ain't worth your cum, Kevin."</p><p>In terror at the thought of what the man was suggesting, I watched as Kevin Lomax turned his head quick enough to give himself whiplash and he looked into my eyes with all the emotions he had been fighting off. Inside of my friend's eyes, inside of his soul, I saw a thousand feelings now confessed in a silent scream communicated to me alone.</p><p>There was self hatred in eyes made lighter as they caught the candlelight and filled with a humanity that was easily understood by a woman whom loved him and was well aquainted with an ocean of similar doubts, insecurities and emotions, razor sharp and double edged. I saw pain and terror...confusion. But most of all I saw two feelings: loss and love.</p><p>
  <em>"I HATE HIM!!! I HATE THE BASTARD! WHY DOES HE ALWAYS HAVE TO WIN? WHY CAN'T I EVER FUCKING BEAT HIM???"</em>
</p><p>And in his gaze, more exposed and vulnerable than our bodies still joined, I understood everything suddenly and with power.</p><p>Kevin Lomax had been trying to damn himself for two purposes:</p><p>To finally beat his father, the Devil...</p><p>And to save me.</p><p>
  <em>"When I started this fucking Abbey, I had a set plan. I needed one special cunt of a nun and the others were all expendable..."</em>
</p><p>
  <em>"He looked at that long line of nuns I marched on past him that day in Trinity and he chose the one..."</em>
</p><p>By choosing me as his own, Kevin had believed he had saved me from being one of the slaughtered inside of the Abbey on Halloween night. He had looked at me in that cemetery and he had known I would not fall to his father, just as he kept refusing to. But, more than that, he had wanted me just as he had claimed.</p><p>Loving him beyond any feeling other than that which I saved for God and his own Son, I raised my head and whispered into the son of the Devil's ear.</p><p>"I loved you the moment I first saw you, Kevin Lomax...I loved you just like I loved the Devil's Paintbrushes even though I thought it was wrong. Because nothing that sad and that beautiful, and that touched my soul and made me feel so much love, could ever belong to the Devil. It's just a name and a paintbrush is only ever a tool...it can be used for good or for evil...just as we each can be the Devil's child or God's if we truly want to be..."</p><p>I kissed the side of his face, feeling him shudder above me. "Remember how I told you that whenever we found one of God's creatures that it made them all the more special? Well, you're mine, Kevin. You're that one special creation to me..."</p><p>My tears painted his face as I rubbed my cheek into his. Seeing the image of Christ baring our sins above us, I understood that the Savior was strong enough to carry one more on his wide shoulders that already bore the weight of the world and all the souls dwelling in it.</p><p>"Now make <em>love</em> to me," I begged Lomax in desperation, knowing that if I didn't give my body willingly once to the man I loved before the Devil came inside, that I would truly be lost forever.</p><p>Kevin gazed down at me and when our lips met this time it was an act both reciprocated and wanted.</p><p>"What do you think you are doing?" John Milton asked, easily reading the change in his selected victim's attitude.</p><p>I thrusted my chest up against that of my lover's, wriggling my breasts against his much flatter skin and feeling the cock delightfully hardening within me from the provocative action and the upward grinding of the groin which was enveloping it.</p><p>"I love you," Kevin Lomax whispered into my ear as he began to thrust his hips slow and powerfully. "I love you as much as I loved her..."</p><p>"JUST WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?" Satan demanded again, as if the sight of two people making love was new and repulsive to him.</p><p>Although I was still bound, my hands began to slip from their binds. I called it a miracle, fully knowing it might have been solely caused by my sweat, but aware that God had his own tools with which he worked His wonders.</p><p>My free hands went to the lawyer's back and buttocks, beginning to explore both, reveling in the sweat it could now discover. Kevin's cock felt stronger, harder, wider than before and his lips more joyful in their suckling on my grateful breasts.</p><p>"NO! NO! NO!" it was John Milton's turn to scream out inside the consecrated place. He jumped on to the platform and started to grab at his son, whom was sensuously pounding into me with my full consent.</p><p>"NOOOOOOO!" Milton screamed in outrage, a cry so loud that God could not have helped but hear him.</p><p>A crumbling of plaster, the sound of creaking in response to the Devil's fury, the crucifix on the wall began to fall from off of its resting place of decades. Both Kevin and I looked up from the altar to watch the Savior's descent to meet his tempter in the desert of Judaea.</p><p>However, as the Christ fell, it appeared to me that his hands became loosed from their own binds, just as mine had, and he looked to be preparing to embrace John Milton.</p><p>"FUCK YOU!!!!" Milton screamed in agonized wrath and defeat before he disappeared into nothing, avoiding the forgiveness of his enemy.</p><p>Alone in the church, but perhaps not entirely, Kevin Lomax and I finished our act of love. I held the lawyer, as he kissed and sucked on my breasts for a few minutes longer, his mouth gradually ascending to my own, where out lips locked as I climaxed for the first time with full consent given without regret or shame.</p><p>"Oh...oh...love you...I love you so much, Kevin," I cried.</p><p>Kevin moaned between kisses during his own release. "I love you...I love you, Erin."</p><p>Our mutual orgasms lasted a long time, pushing away the horror of what had transpired before in a wave of love. Sunlight began to stream through the stained glass window, casting odd yet beautiful colors on the cathedral floor.</p><p>Some of which were gold, orange and red.</p><p>* * *</p><p>The surviving nuns of the Little Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, save for myself, were arrested on charges of multiple homicide. Though their faces made all the papers, and it was touted as being the trial of the century, Kevin Lomax refused to represent any othe the women and eventually they all pleaded guilty on reasons of insanity. It was a case easily strengthened by their reported disclosures on how the missing Reverend Mother had told them to do it and how she had impregnated, at least, two of them.</p><p>Kevin and I went down to Florida to visit Alice Lomax in the hospital. She had regained consciousness, sometime during the early morning of All Saint's Day, to the Doctors' shock and confusion. As the woman greeted her son and his new girlfriend, an overweight and very shy ex-nun, she looked at us both tentatively but her smiles were warm and genuine as was the kindness in her eyes. When I returned after giving the mother and son some time to talk alone, I heard her saying, "She loves you, Kevin. Don't doubt that. I see it in her eyes. I know you've always been a doubter but don't screw this up...Mary Ann would even approve."</p><p>Walking into the room a second later I found Kevin staring at the hospital bed his mother was lying on, a sad look on his handsome, thoughtful face.</p><p>We stayed with Mrs. Lomax after she had been released.</p><p>One night, four weeks after Halloween, in the room of my love's childhood home, surrounded by milkweed instead of red daisies, I opened my eyes to find Kevin Lomax staring at me. Tears were falling down his face and he looked lost and frightened, just as he must have often felt in his youth. "I was going to kill it," he whispered. "I was going to take you, like he wanted, but I was going to kill the baby. Just like I did with the criminals I set free."</p><p>I thought of the woman found by the docks on the night of the lamb and the wolf and it suddenly made perfect sense. But whether Kevin would have been able to kill our child was a secret only God knew for sure.</p><p>"But Erin..." he continued somberly. "I'd be lying if I told you that a part of me didn't want or like doing those things to you..."</p><p>I nodded, the pillow softer under my head than the truth was. "I'd be lying if I said a part of me didn't want it too," I confessed. "Make one sin, Let him in...Want him to go away, Acknowledge it and pray..." I theorized softly.</p><p>"How can you ever forgive me though?" he asked. "Not God but <em>you</em>? How can you be lying here with me now? I love you but I don't understand..."</p><p>I studied his sweet face and gently brushed the sweat away from his brow.</p><p>"I love you too...because I <em>love</em> you I can forgive you. You know, when Cain killed Abel, God heard Abel's blood calling out to him from the earth...He feels every single thing that we do...and everything we do to one another we do to Him," I said in the darkened bedroom. "We kill Him everyday and we make Him kill others. The image of Christ on the cross confesses that. This is me bearing your sins...this is what you do to me everyday without realizing it. But He forgives us because He loves us. That...was how I knew he'd forgive me for letting go of those useless vows I had made."</p><p>"Useless?" Kevin asked.</p><p>"Because I was yours from the day that He made me, Kevin."</p><p>I sat up in the bed we were sharing and cupped the lawyer's face, kissing his lips gently before removing my nightshirt. Although we had been sleeping together, each there to keep the nightmares away, we had not made love since that last time on the altar.</p><p>I believed that the time had finally come to again.</p><p>"Now be mine," I whispered softly, placing the lawyer's hand on my breast and lying down on the bed that we shared, pulling him on to me for another kiss.</p><p>And Kevin Lomax was.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Two weeks later, my husband had long since returned to his job as a Prosecuter in Florida. He took his job very seriously but if he ever held reservations about the accused he made it his private job to investigate into the allegations from the opposing view. And if he discovered something amiss, certain envelopes would show up at the defense's doorsteps with evidence which could turn the tide in their favor.</p><p>It confused Kevin Lomax's coworkers often that the man they had known to be so proud of his track record for winning now accepted defeat so graciously.</p><p>Not as much as they were confounded by the lawyer's choice for a second wife, however.</p><p>They'd look at the sweet, shy overweight girl that Kevin had married, and whom spent her days helping his mother out at her church, and would scratch their heads in disbelief, comparing her hopelessly with Mary Ann and finding nothing similar between the two at all.</p><p>Kevin and I made repeated visits to see the dead woman's grave and I could read the feeling of fear on my husband's face whenever we returned to New York. "Your father is <em>everywhere</em>," I reminded him.</p><p>"Yeah," Kevin conceded. "But he <em>practices</em> out of New York."</p><p>A week before Christmas I was told, by phone, that I was two months pregnant. Kevin studied me after I had told him in our suite at the Royal Plaza Hotel. There was a Christmas tree in the corner and he had brought me there for a few days of snow before a green December 25th spent in Florida.</p><p>There was a look of panic held in his once more dark eyes, belied by his otherwise calm attorney's face. "You want to..."</p><p>"<em>No</em>," I said vehemently.</p><p>He ran a hand through his hair and his eyes lightened as he made his pain and conflict open. "We can't be sure Erin...if it was from when I was..."</p><p>The words were difficult but he forced them out.</p><p>"raping you or when we made love. In any case, it will be <em>his</em> grandchild."</p><p>I went to the man and knelt before him, placing my hands reassuringly on his knees. "And you are his <em>son</em>. But as I told you...you are God's son too, Kevin Lomax..."</p><p>My hands moved from off his knees, to his face and we kooked at each other as the snow fell gently down outside</p><p>"It doesn't matter when our baby was conceived. It will be the same as any other. Your father never realized that. You were proof of it. He was willing to <em>use</em> you but he never truly <em>saw</em> you."</p><p>Kevin took my hand in his and squeezed it tenderly.</p><p>I smiled at him with the deep love that I felt for both him and our child. "Our baby will paint their life in whatever colors they want to...good or evil, Anti-Christ or savior; it is their choice. We paint ourselves with every stroke...we wouldn't be worth anything to God otherwise. And that is God's gift to each of His creations: That we create ourselves in the end."</p><p>Kevin Lomax stared at me with loving intensity before holding me to him. With the gentleness he showed, I knew that my words had reached him and that he understood that the child growing within me was all its own.</p><p>Just as every human being was</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Dear Keanu;</p><p>Happy Halloween again! :D &lt;3</p><p>I love Halloween. It always made me sad as a kid that my mom only ever took us to the houses she was familiar with. I'd hear the other kids saying how they did every single house and then took the neighbouring city by storm too. :|</p><p>But she was just being careful, I guess.</p><p>There was this one time, though, that I was grateful for a short Trick or Treating. My sis and I went as Alf. Well we wore these slippers...*only* slippers. We could feel every stupid pebble on the road! :/ When we reached the end of the street we were in agony. But mom had made the costumes, herself, and was so cranky she forced us forward. That was when we came to a neighbor's house that had a complete pathway of nothing but stones! :O</p><p>And she made us walk over it! :O</p><p>Another time, my mom dressed up the lamp outside of the house as a witch. When we came back it was all soaking wet and off. Dad informed us that it had caught on fire and the neighbors had all rushed to help put it out! :O</p><p>It was one of the few modern day witch burnings. :/</p><p>I hope your Halloween is going well. I heard you liked going as a vampire. Feel free to turn into a bat and to fly on over to visit me. My neck will be waiting for you! ;D &lt;3</p><p> </p><p>Much love,<br/>Erin<br/>XO XO<br/>:D &lt;3</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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